Tim Raines' case for the Hall of Fame

Former Montreal Expos' star Tim Raines was recently named the manager of the Newark Bears in the independent Atlantic League. After being a coach for the Chicago White Sox from 2004-06, Raines spent last year in anonymity, working as the hitting coach for the class-AA Harrisburg Senators - anonymity that will continue in 2009, as the manager for an independent league team.

Raines should be used to being anonymous, spending the best years of his career playing for (mostly) bad Montreal teams - a fact that may be seriously hurting his Hall of Fame chances. He has not gotten as much attention as other snubs, like Bert Blyleven or Ron Santo, but he might be just as deserving.
Raines is one of the top leadoff hitters in the history of baseball, and belongs in the same category as Rickey Henderson and Lou Brock. Raines would probably have been elected last year, in his first year of eligibility, if not for spending the last six years of his career as a part-time player due to injuries. Had he been a full-time player for a bit longer, he would have reached 3,000 hits and seriously challenged Brock for second all-time in stolen bases. What he did end up with was 2,605 hits and 808 stolen bases, which is good enough for fifth all time.

Those are hardly numbers to be embarrassed by, but Raines' real case lies in how ridiculously good he was in his prime. The Hall of Fame voters love counting numbers, but guys with short careers and amazing primes like Ralph Kiner and Sandy Koufax have been elected before, so there are some precedents showing that a guy like Raines could get in. Raines' career was not even short, it is just that he had a pretty sharp decline once he reached his mid-30s.

I am going to define Raines' prime as 1981-87 (the last year he hit over .300 as a full-time player). Raines was a terror on the basepaths in these years, stealing at least 70 bases in every year but '87. He was excellent in the traditional hitting stats and all over the league leader boards for most of the 1980s; he batted over .300 in five of those seven years, including a batting title in 1986; and he was in the top 10 for walks and triples every year and in the top 10 in on base percentage, runs and hits in six of the seven years.

Besides racking up stolen bases, Raines' skills as a leadoff hitter lie in his OBP, OPS and OPS+. In his prime his OBP was in the high .300s consistently, over .400 from '85-87 and he has a career mark of .385. There are some leadoff hitters like Juan Pierre who give the illusion of being good by hitting singles and stealing bases, but Raines, while not hitting a ton of home runs, was an extra-base machine. His percentage of hits that went for extra bases is 27.3; Henderson's career mark was 28 percent, while Brock is at 25 percent.

Raines was a master of not striking out. His career high in strikeouts was 83, and 966 for a career in which he came to the plate over 10,000 times. He also drew loads of walks - 1,330 in his career - an essential skill for leadoff hitters, and a major reason his OBP was as high as it was.

Lou Brock, in comparison, came to the plate over 11,000 times but drew only 761 walks and had 1,730 strikeouts.

All those extra base hits and walks gave Raines excellent OPSs; he was over .800 in six of his seven prime years, and was at .955 in 1987 - a number that high is almost unheard of for non-power hitters. His OPS+ was top 10 in those same six years, including a string of 138, 151, 145 and 149. Compare those numbers to Brock, and Raines was clearly better - Brock's best year was 146, but he was never higher than 128 in any other year. Brock was over 100 for a larger percentage of his career, but his career mark is only 109, whereas Raines' is 123 - which is getting close to leadoff-god Henderson's mark of 127.

So what does all this tell us? It's clear that Raines' prime was far and away better than Brock, and while Brock's counting stats are better than Raines', they're not that much better. A serious argument could even be made that his career as a whole was better than Brock's. Raines is at least the third-best leadoff hitter of the modern era, was one of the best hitters of the 1980s, a decade that is extremely underrepresented in the Hall of Fame and might be the best Expo of all time, a team that is destined to be just as underrepresented.

So put him in the Hall, where he belongs. His exhibit could even include a game-used vial of cocaine.