Tim Raines’ Hall of Fame Day

Tim Raines, the long-time outfielder for the Montreal Expos and five other teams, was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum last July after a 10-year wait on the BBWAA (Baseball Writers Association of America) ballot.

To this author, there’s one game that defines the greatness of the career of Tim Raines. It was 31 years ago today, on Saturday, May 2, 1987. It was the 21st game of the season for the Montreal Expos but for Raines, a six-time All-Star, it was his season debut.

Raines had been a free agent in the off-season, expecting multiple multi-million dollar offers as one of the top players in the sport. But the off-seasons of 1985-1987 featured an industry-wide collusion on the part of the 26 MLB teams; free agents were not lavished with the types of offers they deserved. All teams agreed not to offer position players any contracts greater than three years in length.

In the end, with nothing but three-year deals in the offing, Raines re-signed with the Expos. However, per the rules at the time, as a declared free agent he was was not allowed to ink the contract with his current team until May 1st.

Tim Raines’ Hall of Fame Day at Shea Stadium

Raines finally was able to make his 1987 season debut on May 2nd. The Expos were in New York, taking on the defending World Series champion Mets in a nationally televised “Game of the Week” on NBC, with Vin Scully at the microphone. I was personally going to a lot of Mets’ games in those years and, since it was a Saturday, made the drive from New Haven, Connecticut to Shea Stadium to see the game.

What I saw was a player who, not having had the benefit of any spring training games, took the first pitch he saw from David Cone and, batting left-handed, laced a triple to right field. In his next three plate appearances, the Expos left fielder added a single with a walk, a stolen base and a run scored.

In the top of the 9th inning, with the Expos trailing 6-4, Raines led off with an infield single to the left side of the infield, sparking a two-run rally that tied the score at 6. After the Mets failed to score at the bottom of the frame, the game went to extra innings.

In the top of the 10th, Mets’ reliever Jesse Orosco allowed the first three batters to reach. Raines, at the plate with the bases loaded, now batting right-handed, proceeded to launch the ball into the left-field bullpen for a grand slam. The Expos won the game, I drove back to New Haven a disappointed Mets’ fan, and Raines had his moment of legend.

Two months later, on July 1st, Raines was sitting pretty with a .373 batting average with a 1.021 OPS and 55 runs scored in 54 team games. The Expos, who had posted just a 8-13 record without their best player, went 83-58 (.589) after his return, finishing just 4 games out of first place in the N.L. East.

Despite the late start, 1987 was one of Raines’ best seasons in his long career. He posted a career high with 18 home runs despite missing those first 21 games, while also setting a career mark with a .526 slugging percentage.

Although this game at Shea Stadium represented the only time in Raines’ 2,502 career games that he managed 4 hits and 4 RBI, this performance, pound for pound, was not the best of his career.

Six years and a day prior to his big day at Shea, Raines as a rookie hit a 13th inning walk-off home run to give the Expos a 9-8 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers. That was the first of 15 walk-off hits in Raines’ 23-year career. Later in ’87, the 7-time All-Star hit a two-run triple in the Mid-Summer Classic to break a scoreless tie in the 13th inning and deliver the National League a 2-0 win.

What made May 2, 1987 the defining game of Tim Raines’ career was the fact that he was a force from start to finish and, more importantly, that it was nationally televised. This was the 1980’s. There was no MLB Extra Innings; there were no games on ESPN yet. This was a team from Canada and thus there was a rare nationwide audience to watch the Expos’ dynamic superstar.

This was a showcase performance against the defending World Champs, one with the added storyline of the fact that it was Raines’ first game of the season. Without the benefit of spring training, Raines was expected to be rusty but instead he was in peak form. In the end, he beat the pitcher who closed out the Mets’ seven-game World Series win the previous October. And he beat that pitcher with a grand slam.

If one game represents the signature for a Hall of Famer, this was the one for Tim Raines.

The Second Greatest

Tim Raines made two big mistakes in his life. The first is that he used cocaine early in his career, which forever tarnished his image and might even have played a role in why it took him 10 years to get into the Hall of Fame.

His second mistake was to begin his career in 1979, the same year that another young player hit the big leagues, a guy named Rickey Henderson. As a quintessential lead-off hitter, Raines was Haydn to Rickey’s Mozart. If you know who Joseph Haydn was, you get it. If you’ve never heard of Haydn, then I’ve made my point with you too.

In the balance of this piece, we’ll take a look at the three phases of Tim Raines’ career. We’ll examine how his hitting and base-running ability made him arguably the most valuable position player in the game for a seven-year period of time. We’ll also discuss why it took ten years for the writers to come around to Raines’ Cooperstown cause.

At the end of the piece, we’ll compare Raines to Lou Brock, who was the base-stealing star predecessor to both Raines and Henderson.

Cooperstown Cred: Tim Raines

Elected to the Hall of Fame in 2017, his 10th year on the ballot, with 86.0% of the vote

• 808 career stolen bases (5th all time) 
• 6 straight years with 70 or more stolen bases (one of only two players ever to do this — Vince Coleman)
• 85% career SB% (best ever for min 400 attempts)
• .294 career AVG, .385 OBP, .425 SLG, .810 OPS
• 123 career OPS+ (4th best for any player with 500+ SB in last 100 years) (behind Barry Bonds, Joe Morgan, Rickey Henderson)
• 7-time All-Star

• 69.4 career WAR (tied for 5th best since 1901 for left fielders – minimum 45% of games played in LF)

(Cover photo: Newsday)

Tim Raines, known as “Rock,” was a spectacular, dynamic player, easily the 2nd best lead-off hitter in the 1980’s. 2nd best. To Rickey Henderson.

Raines was also one of the greatest base runners ever but he almost ran out of time to make it to the Hall of Fame. When he debuted on the 2008 ballot, he received just 24% of the vote. After a slight dip in 2009, Raines’ vote percentage steadily climbed. In 2015, he received 55% of the vote and then surged to just under 70% in 2016.  In his 10th and final year on the ballot, the writers finally gave Raines his due and overwhelmingly voted in his favor, bestowing 86% of the vote in favor of induction.

The High Percentage Stolen Base Artist

Tim Raines’ greatest Hall of Fame credential is his 85% career stolen base percentage. In modern analytics we’ve learned that, for stolen bases to be worthwhile, the runner needs to succeed at least 73.5% of the time or better.

Anyway, for most of the history of baseball nobody knew what these run expectancy probabilities were: the mass accumulation of stolen bases was interpreted as a good thing, an act that led to scoring runs and that, as long as you were successful more than half of the time, you were helping the team.

When Raines was stealing his 808 bases, most people didn’t appreciate the significance of his success rate. We can’t compare Rock’s base-stealing prowess to early greats like Ty Cobb because Caught Stealing records are incomplete prior to 1951. Still, there are 45 Hall of Fame position players who debuted in ’51 or later and not one of them owns a stolen base success rate equal to Raines’.

1981-87: One of the Game’s Best

Raines essentially had three careers: the first third of his career (1981-1987), where he was one of the top 5 players in the game. After a couple of call-ups in 1979 and 1980, Raines earned the starting left-fielder’s job in 1981 and became one of the most exciting players in baseball. He hit .304, had a .391 on-base% and stole an astounding 71 bases in just 88 games (with the season shortened by the player’s strike). He made the first of seven consecutive All-Star appearances and was the runner up for the National League Rookie of the Year (to Fernando Valenzuela).

Rock had a solid sophomore campaign in 1982 but it was the worst of his seven All-Star years and we know now that some of his less-than-spectacular play was due to his struggles with cocaine. After the season, Raines went into drug rehabilitation and he rebounded in 1983 with a terrific year, one in which he led the majors with 133 runs scored and the NL with 90 steals. It was during this time that Raines forged a bond with his teammate Andre Dawson, who became somewhat of a mentor and big brother to him.

By Wins Above Replacement (WAR), Raines was the 4th best player in the majors from 1981-1987, behind first-ballot Hall of Famers Henderson, Mike Schmidt and Wade Boggs.

Here are Raines’ ranks during that “first third” of his career.

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You can see that although Raines and Henderson were human incarnations of the Pony Express, neither one was a one-trick pony. They both were excellent hitters: they hit with extra base power and were masterful at earning the free pass.

Simply put: they were the first and second best base runners in the modern history of the game but they were also complete players. Henderson was just bigger and badder but both were of Hall of Fame caliber, at least during this seven-year period.

The memorable national TV performance on May 2nd, 1987 jump-started Rock’s last great season. He hit .330 with a 149 OPS+, a league-leading 123 runs scored, along with 50 stolen bases (out of 55 attempts).

1988-1995: from Montreal to Chicago’s South Side

Anyway, in the second act of Raines’ career (from 1988 to 1995, his last three years in Montreal and in five seasons with the Chicago White Sox), he was still a highly productive everyday player but not the superstar that he was in his youth.

He was just 30th in WAR and was no longer the explosive base-stealing threat that he was in his 20’s (was 8th in SB’s during these years, racking up 266 steals while the still-explosive Henderson swiped 448).

Still, even during his years as a highly productive but not superstar player, Raines’ WAR of 26.6 from ’88-to-’95 was a sold third best among left fielders (behind only Barry Bonds and Henderson).

1996-2002: 5 Teams and 2 Rings

In his third career (1996-2002, with 5 different teams) Tim Raines was a platoon or bench player. Raines won two World Series rings with the New York Yankees in 1996 and 1998 but he was not even one of the 15 best players on those teams (and he was only 36 years old in ’96).

Raines earned just 4.2 Wins Above Replacement in those seven seasons. He swiped a mere 31 bases in the last 7 years of his career, after 777 in the years prior.

Rock’s career nearly ended entirely in June 1999 when (with Oakland), he was diagnosed with lupus, necessitating radiation therapy; he would miss the rest of the season and all of 2000. Raines made a brief comeback with the Expos, Orioles and Marlins in 2001-2002 as a bench player, getting 223 plate appearances in 149 games. He stole just one base during his last two years in the majors.

How Tim Raines’ Greatness Directly Led to Team Wins

There’s one other statistic, not as widely known, that makes the case for Raines as one of the game’s best from 1981-1987 (and beyond). This stat is called WPA, which stands for Win Probability Added (see the glossary for full details). What this does is go through each individual offensive play from the perspective of both the hitter and the pitcher. For each player, the outcome of each at bat either adds to or subtracts from the team’s odds of winning a game. Let me give you an example:

Kirk Gibson’s home run off Dennis Eckersley in the 9th inning of Game 1 of the 1988 World Series had a WPA of 0.87. That means that his action increased the Dodgers’ chances of winning from 13% to 100%. If he had made an out, his WPA would have been -0.13, since, because there were two outs, the odds of the Dodgers’ winning would have gone from 13% to zero.

So, WPA calculates the game-specific impact of each offensive play as it relates to the player’s team’s odds of winning or losing any game. WPA tracks any offensive play in which the batter makes an out or reaches base but also any play in which a base-runner advances without the batter ending his turn at bat. It is here where Raines’ success rate as a stolen base artist demonstrates his positive impact on winning games, since a typical time being caught stealing is about 3 times more damaging than the positive impact of a successful steal.

Look at the list of WPA leaders from 1981 to 1987:

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Raines barely edges Hall of Famer Eddie Murray in Win Probability Added despite Murray’s 708 RBI because of the value he added on the base-paths. Simply put, Raines’ actions at the plate and on the bases added more probability that his team would win baseball games than any other player during these years and he was better than the Man of Steal (Henderson) by a factor of 20% (because Rickey was caught stealing nearly twice as much as Raines).

Now, in case you’re curious why Henderson’s WAR was 9 more than Raines’ during these years (despite nearly identical OBP and SLG numbers), it’s because the defensive metrics had Rickey as one of the top 5 defensive players from 1981-87. WAR accounts for defense, WPA for a position player only counts actions at the plate or on the bases.

Incidentally, Dale Murphy was also one of the stars of the 1980’s who also has not made the Hall of Fame. He was one of the best players from 1980-1988 and has a legitimate Cooperstown case. However, what hurt Murphy was that his “second act” was really poor.

Why did it Take 10 Years for Cooperstown to Call?

If it’s a demonstrable fact that Tim Raines was, at the very least, the 2nd greatest stolen base artist in the last 65 years (more on this below), why did it take Raines so long to get the affirmative nod of 75% of the BBWAA’s voters?

One theory is that, in his best years, he played in Montreal. Sorry. Boring. Not in the USA. Nobody cares. It’s not really true that nobody cared but playing in Canada didn’t help him. Two of Raines’ teammates (Andre Dawson and Gary Carter) overcame the Canada factor but they also benefited by producing Hall of Fame caliber seasons later in their careers in the big media markets of Chicago and New York.

Raines had a seven-year Hall of Fame peak, an additional eight-year span where he was solid but not an All-Star and a final seven-year span where he added little value.

It is understandable that a player who really didn’t have one Hall of Fame caliber season in the final 15 seasons of his career had a difficult time getting voted into Cooperstown. He spent eight of those final years in Chicago and New York, home to intense media coverage and lots of baseball writers who vote for the Hall inductees.

I think it’s natural that some (or many) of these writers, who never saw Raines in his prime on an everyday basis, would have a gut feeling that he was just a cut below based on the player they saw with their own eyes.

The Milestone Factor

This is an important point: for many Hall of Fame players, “hanging around” at the end of their career as a part-time or average player can accrue significant benefits: you can hit your 500th home run, get your 3,000th hit, or win your 300th game. Tim Raines is currently 5th on the all-time stolen base list (behind Henderson, Lou Brock, the 19th century’s Billy Hamilton and Ty Cobb).

After the 1994 season, Tim Raines was already 5th on the all-time stolen base list. So, for the last eight years of his career, his 44 steals didn’t move him up the list at all. No publicity. No big media moment that a milestone accomplishment brings.

Raines’ career arc (being one of the best in the sport for seven or eight years and in the second tier for the next seven to eight) is typical for many Hall of Fame careers, by the way.

To use a recent example, Craig Biggio was 5th in MLB in WAR from 1991-1998, trailing only Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., teammate Jeff Bagwell and Frank Thomas. Biggio made seven All-Star teams in those eight years. From 1999-2005, the Astros’ 2nd baseman had no All-Star appearances and ranked just 86th in WAR (and only 11th among second sackers).

So Biggio’s career arc is analogous to Raines’, with a couple of key differences. The first is that Raines’ “second career” was actually a bit more productive than Biggio’s. The second, and the one that put Biggio into Cooperstown in just three years, is that he remained healthy for virtually his entire career and thus accumulated nearly 2,000 more plate appearances than Raines did.

Therefore, Biggio was able to cross the 3,000-hit milestone while Raines fell nearly 400 hits shy. Also, Biggio’s didn’t have a “third career” as a part-time player. He logged 555 plate appearances in his final season (2007).

Raines vs. Brock

Tim Raines was a unique player who had a career with almost no directly similar comparison but the closest is first ballot Hall of Famer Lou Brock, who was also a left fielder and an all-time great base stealing threat.

By any measurable metric, Brock was not as good a baseball player as Rock Raines but he had the good sense to cross the 3,000 hit plateau, steal 118 bases in his age 35 season and finish his career as the all-time stolen base leader (later passed only by Rickey). These are the types of late-in-career accomplishments that gain you instant induction into Cooperstown.

Anyway, here are the numbers: Lou Brock vs. Tim Raines:

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Brock (known as “The Franchise” in St. Louis) had 881 more career plate appearances than Rock Raines. This is because (to his credit) he was a much more productive player in his 30’s than was Raines in his. He had 3,023 career hits (a Cooperstown benchmark); Raines had only 2,605. But Raines got to first base via the walk almost twice as often; in his career he reached base more than Brock did, with 418 less hits.

This is important. If you look at how many times each man got on base, either via a hit, a walk, a hit batsman, or when reaching on an error, Tim Raines reached base 4,076 times in his career. Lou Brock reached base 4,001 times.

That’s 75 more times on base for Raines, despite 881 fewer career plate appearances.

Add in the fact that Raines’ stolen base success rate was 10 percentage points better (85% to 75%) and it’s really not close between these two, in terms of the regular season performances.

Lou Brock’s Value

Having made the point quite clearly that Rock Raines was a superior player to Lou Brock and thus an obvious Hall of Famer, allow me to finish by defending the Franchise’s Cooperstown credentials.

As Bob Costas said on MLB Network three years ago, if you were playing a game of Strat-O-Matic baseball and had to pick Brock or Raines, you would choose Raines. But this is not to say that Lou Brock shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame. Brock did get 3,000 hits. He did set the all-time single season and all-time career stolen base record (until broken by Henderson). Plus, he was also an integral part of three pennants and two World Series Championships with the St. Louis Cardinals.

Raines also won two titles but was mostly a bystander and the Yankees would have won both times without him.

If you took Lou Brock away from the Cardinals in the 1960’s, you would have had at least one less World Series title. Brock was clearly one of the team’s three best players in 1964 (with Bob Gibson and Ken Boyer); the team won the pennant by a single game and the Series in seven games over the Yankees. If you took Brock away from that team, they would not have won the pennant.

The 101-win Cardinals squad of 1967 was more of a super-team and won the pennant by 10 games so you can’t argue that any single player was indispensable. But in the Fall Classic, another seven-game series (this time against the Boston Red Sox), Brock was the hitting star, batting. 414, stealing 7 bases (without being caught) while scoring 8 runs.

Finally, although the Redbirds fell in seven games to the Detroit Tigers in the 1968 series, Brock was the star player in the losing effort, hitting .464 with 2 HR, 5 RBI and another 7 steals.

This is the Hall of Fame, and Lou Brock absolutely deserves his plaque in Cooperstown.

Rock Raines deserves his plaque as well. To this baseball observer, Raines cemented his Hall of Fame status on that afternoon at Shea Stadium in New York, 31 years ago.

Thanks for reading. Please follow me on Twitter @cooperstowncred.