By: Jay Teitel
When Tim Raines was once again passed over for induction into the baseball Hall of Fame—a fact that was totally overshadowed by the rejection of several big-name candidates suspected of having used performance-enhancing drugs—I was disappointed, but not surprised. It was the sixth consecutive rejection for Raines since he became eligible in 2008, and although his vote count has increased every year save one, the gains are small enough that a disturbing trend is emerging: the one that produces a worthy candidate who might actually burn up his 15 years of eligibility without making the Hall’s notoriously stringent cut. Passing on Raines this year is especially ironic, though, because none of the 37 eligible candidates received the requisite 75 percent of votes, and because it came against a backdrop of “injustice” talk. Was Mike Piazza being done an injustice by being lumped together in the minds of the voting baseball writers with Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens? Were Bonds and Clemens being done an injustice by receiving such low first-ballot percentages of the vote? To my mind, the only true injustice on Jan. 9 was directed at Raines—although his exclusion is actually closer to a travesty, and a mystery. And what makes it even
more baffling is that it’s a mystery supported by a lot of people who should know better. Until a few months ago, for instance, if you’d mentioned Raines to me, two things would have come to my mind: One, the story about him sliding head-first on the basepaths because he didn’t want to break the vials of cocaine in his back pocket; and two, the fact I always semi-confused him with Ron LeFlore—i.e., black Expos who were great base-stealers and who had somehow been involved with drugs. My knee-jerk impressions hail from a brief brush Raines had with recreational drug use (not PED use) as a young major-leaguer in the early 1980s, and it turns out that they aren’t just a bit poisonous—they’re totally misleading when it comes to the measure of Raines’s career.
Here are the objective facts about that career, the bare bones of the mystery. Raines, a switch-hitting left-fielder, played 23 years in the big leagues (13 of them for the Expos) from 1979 to 2002, during which he established himself, numerically, as probably the second-best leadoff man (.294 lifetime batting average, 2,605 hits, 170 home runs, an .810 OPS) and second-best base-stealer (808 stolen bases) of all time. He had the misfortune of playing at the same time as the acknowledged best in both those categories, Rickey Henderson, but even then Raines was statistically competitive. Henderson stole 1,406 bases in total, an amazing number, but he did it in 1,741 attempts, for an 80.8 stolen-base percentage, 13th among those with at least 400 attempted steals. Raines ranks first on that list, with an 84.7 percent success rate. Only 10 players in history have stolen 35 consecutive bases and Henderson is not one of them; Raines is one of only three players who have done it twice. In 1985 and ’86 both, he stole 70 bases while being caught only nine times. During a seven-year stretch from 1981–87, Raines, an all-star in each of those seasons, had more hits than anyone in baseball, tied for first in triples, was second in runs, and third in on-base percentage (behind only Henderson and Wade Boggs, both runaway first-ballot Hall of Famers). This despite the fact that due to the 1987 collusion scandal, in which owners collectively worked to keep salaries down, Raines missed a month of a season in his prime. A free agent that spring, he went unsigned, and, due to another draconian regulation, wasn’t permitted to sign with his own team, the Expos, until May 1. Speaking to Sports Illustrated in 1984, Pete Rose said: “Right now [Raines is] the best player in the National League. ‘Rock’ can beat you in more ways than any other player in the league… with his glove, his speed and his hitting from either side of the plate.” And in the 1988 edition of his legendary Baseball Abstract, Bill James ranked Raines a close second to Boggs in the category of “best player in baseball.”
The mystery deepens when you compare Raines to other similar players, peers or not, who are in Cooperstown. Lou Brock, the celebrated St. Louis Cardinals base thief, second behind Henderson with 938, isn’t even within hailing distance of Raines’s success rate for steals; in fact, he was caught more than twice as many times, which means, statistically, his running was far less helpful to his team. Brock had 3,023 career hits to Raines’s 2,605, but Raines walked so much more frequently that he actually got on base more than Brock, despite the fact that Brock had nearly a thousand more plate appearances. Yet Brock made it into the Hall on his first try with 79.7 percent of the vote, compared to Raines’s 24.3 percent his first year of eligibility in 2008. Raines played in a different era than Brock, but in the same era as Tony Gwynn, the hitting genius who earned his Hall pass on his first try in 2007 with more than 97 percent of the vote. Gwynn’s .338 career batting average outshone Raines (and most mere hitting mortals), but Raines’s steals total outshone Gwynn’s (and most mere base-stealing mortals). Gwynn had more hits than Raines, but, again, Raines got on base more often. Since the Second World War, he’s 32nd in total times reaching base (3,977), one spot ahead of Gwynn (3,955). If you narrow the field to players with 10,000 plate appearances since 1945, Raines’s OBP ranks 11th, ahead of Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt, and Derek Jeter. And finally, in the category of Win Shares, the statistical measure that takes into account the offensive and defensive assets a player brings to his team (Raines was an excellent fielder who led the league in outfield assists in 1983 with 21), Raines accumulated 390 during his career. Since the late 1970s, 20 players have become eligible for the Hall with 380 or more Win Shares. Every one has been a first-ballot selectee. Except Tim Raines. But why?
The most commonly cited reason is that Raines played the bulk of his best years in relative obscurity in Montreal. But the same disadvantage hasn’t stopped baseball writers from electing his Expos teammates Gary Carter and Andre Dawson. More plausible are a trio of other reasons: one understandable, one misguided, and one that Craig R. Wright, an early advocate of sabermetrics who spent 20 years advising various MLB front offices in player acquisitions and scouting, terms truly “seamy.” Call them the three “Rs.”
The first “R” is for Rickey Henderson. A superstar of superstars at the same specialty as Raines—leadoff man—Henderson was in the majors for Raines’s entire career. He was the sparkplug legend in the making (goes the argument), dimming everyone by comparison, particularly someone, like Raines, whose skill set was similar to his. Hence, Hall of Fame voters haven’t been able to get past the fact that Raines suffered by contrast; admitting Raines to the Hall would somehow diminish Henderson’s presence. But just because Einstein existed doesn’t mean no one else gets to win the Nobel Prize in physics. You can’t use the anomaly to reset the bar. Of Henderson’s chances of getting into the Hall, James once said, “If you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.” Raines was only one Hall of Famer. But one should be enough.
The second “R” is (recreational) drugs. In 1982, when he was 23 and in only his third season in the majors, Raines’s production dipped noticeably. After the season, at the urging of Dawson, Raines voluntarily admitted to the Expos that he had developed a serious cocaine addiction. He entered rehab that winter, kicked the habit, and, from all reports, never relapsed. But the baseball universe apparently never forgot. Some suspect that this extends to Hall of Fame voters as well. “I’m amazed,” Wright wrote in a 2008 column berating voters for not inducting Raines on the first ballot, “at how well this early cocaine problem is remembered, and you don’t have to spend much time on the web to realize some folks still hold this against him.” No matter how much traction the incident still has, it’s obvious how unfair excluding Raines is because of it: Cocaine is not a performance-enhancing drug, and Raines voluntarily disclosed his problem and went into rehab. His situation couldn’t have been more different from the alleged steroid users he shared a ballot with.
But when you tie it to the third “R,” racism, the drug-use rationale turns truly insidious. It would be far-fetched to argue that anti-black prejudice has kept Raines out of Cooperstown, but it’s much harder to discount the claim that in the sports world, black athletes who get involved with drugs—or any illegal activities for that matter—are judged differently than white athletes who do the same. We can all shake our heads and pretend this is not so, but we all know at a deeper level that it is. Keith Law, once the special assistant to the GM for the Blue Jays and now lead baseball analyst for ESPN Scouts Inc., argued the case eloquently in 2009, the second year Raines was rejected by Hall voters. Noting that several academics had written about the American media’s unequal treatment of white and black drug users, Law cited the glaring difference between the Cooperstown reception for Raines and Paul Molitor, a white player with career credentials similar to Raines (higher hitting totals but fewer stolen bases and a thousand fewer games played in the field). In 1984, it was revealed (after the fact) that Molitor had also been a heavy cocaine user in the early years of his career. But in the first year of Molitor’s eligibility, 2004, he was inducted with better than 85 percent of the vote, 299 votes more than Raines received his first year of eligibility. “So why does Molitor get a free pass,” Law wrote, “while Raines struggles to reach even a quarter of the vote?” Law doesn’t claim that any individual voter is racist, he says, but that “pervasive societal stereotypes may be hurting Raines’s Hall chances.”
I think Law is being generous, and that the race/drugs connection is definitely a factor when it comes to Raines and Cooperstown. But another stereotype may be just as responsible: race combined with our culture of exceptionalism. This is the classic sports-specific bigotry as backhanded compliment, the prejudice that “because” black players are naturally more athletic, they can’t be acclaimed for being just consistently and quietly excellent—they have to be uniquely gifted. White players can garner applause and name recognition for hustle and work ethic, but black players have to be exciting, too. That can mean a white player with certain statistics earns a high profile and is admitted to Cooperstown while a black player with similar stats is overlooked.
Am I overstressing the race part of the equation here? Possibly. But even if I am, our general intolerance these days of anything but the gold medal is unfair to all athletes, regardless of colour. If Halls of Fame were restricted to record holders, how many people would be in them?
The bottom line is this: Tim Raines deserves to be in Cooperstown. To those people who have kept him out so far, I can only repeat what Wright wrote to any voter who said yes to Molitor and then decided “in even the slightest way” that Raines should be excluded for a year or longer because of his early brush with drugs: “Shame. Shame on you.”
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.