The Futility Infielder

Whether it's Virginia, Connecticut, Portland, Las Vegas, or points beyond, the Expos have no future in Montreal, and their present, with the losses of Vladimir Guerrero and Javier Vazquez over the winter, is no bed of roses. They need any excuse they can to draw fans to Olympic Stadium, where they averaged a paltry 13,537 per game last season. But it's tough to be cynical about the Expos' recent announcement that they will pay tribute to perhaps the greatest player from their past, Tim Raines, by retiring his number 30 this summer. Festivities are scheduled for June 19, when the Expos play the Chicago White Sox, the team for whom Raines played five years following his Montreal tenure. Since the retractable roof of Big Owe is long gone, there's no chance the game will be rained out.

This feel-good move gives whatever fans remain in the city one final chance to cheer for Raines, who made seven All-Star teams in parts of 13 seasons with the club. I note it not because I'll be there, but because Raines is one of my all-time favorite ballplayers as well. His 23-season career took me from the fever pitch of my early enthusiasm for the game to the semiprofessional obsession that my mid-30s has wrought. He was the National League's answer to Rickey Henderson in the early '80s, an electrifying ballplayer who set the baseball world on its ear by stealing 71 bases in only 88 games in the strike-torn 1981 season, and continued his base-stealing dominance with five more 70+ seasons.

But steals were only one facet of his game. He was a consummate leadoff hitter, getting on base well over 40 percent of the time at his peak and scoring 100 runs or more in a season six times. While we now know that stolen bases aren't as valuable as previously thought, any time you can lay an 84 percent success rate on top of a .400 OBP, you've got a guy who can get himself into scoring position a ton of times. Additonally, Raines had enough power to hit 170 homers, and his speed bought him a lot of doubles and triples as well. Late in his career, he was a handy bench player and clubhouse leader for two Yankee World Champion teams. He overcame both an early-career cocaine problem (reportedly he would slide headfirst to protect the vials in his back pocket) and a late-career bout with lupus that cost him the 2000 season. In late in 2001, he was traded to the Orioles for a chance to play on the same big-league team as his son, Tim Raines, Jr.

Two of my favorite Raines memories come from the 1987 season. A free agent the previous winter coming off a .334/.413/.476 season with 70 steals, Raines was a victim of the owners' collusion, receiving not a single offer for his services. As per league rules, he couldn't return to the Expos until May; his debut, on May 2 of that year was televised as NBC's Game of the Week. On that afternoon, Raines' gave a performance for the ages. Batting third, he tripled off of David Cone in his first at-bat, though was stranded at third. Next time up, he walked, stole second, and scored on a base hit. A groundout and a single followed. With the Expos trailing 6-4 in the 9th, he started a game-tying rally with a leadoff single then won the game in the 10th with a grand slam home run off of Jesse Orosco, his fourth hit on the day (apparently, I'm not the only fan of this performance). At the All-Star game that year, he came off the bench in the sixth inning, got three hits, the last of which, a two-run triple, broke a scoreless deadlock that had lasted to the 13th frame. For that, he took home the game's MVP award. On the season, Raines hit .330/.429/.526 with 18 homers and 50 steals (and was only caught five times). Had it not been for collusion, he might have won the MVP.

A couple of late-career highlights stand out in my mind as well. On April 30, 1998, I attended a Yankees-Mariners game with my brother, one that fit into our tradition of choosing epic slugfests between the two teams. That night, I saw something I'd never seen before -- two teams combining to score in every inning. With the Yanks down 8-7 in the bottom of the ninth and that every-inning status in jeopardy, Raines led off by smacking a game-tying homer off of Bobby (7.29 ERA) Ayala, and the Yanks scored in the 10th to win the game and preserve the strange streak.

On October 6, 2001, I was at Camden Yards for Cal Ripken Jr.'s final game. Raines was there as well, having recently been traded from the Expos to the O's so he could join his son for his promotion to the bigs. He didn't start, but in the eighth inning, he pinch-hit, stepping in to face David Cone for a moment that made my hair stand on end. Here's what I wrote at the time:

For my money, this was the best baseball moment of the night: two former teammates who set the tone for the legendary 1998 Yankees with their professionalism and class; two grizzled vets who knew the amazing peaks and harrowing valleys of baseball -- fighting injuries, poor health, and ineffectiveness in search of redemption. It was simply a delicious moment, especially with the possibility that both might be playing their own final games, albeit with considerably less fanfare than Ripken.

Having no genuine stake in the outcome, I found myself torn, hoping perhaps for a dramatic hit from Raines but reluctant to sully Cone's masterful performance. In the end, the crafty pitcher won out. Raines took a ball from Cone, then grounded sharply to shortstop for a fielder's choice to end the inning.

For what it's worth, both Raines and Cone did play again, the former spending 2002 as a pinch-hitter for the Florida Marlins, the latter with an aborted comeback attempt with the Mets last year. Oh well, you can't see them all off to retirement.

Is Raines a Hall of Famer? At first glance his 2,605 hits and .294/.385/.425 line suffer by comparison to Henderson, his exact contemporary (3,055 hits, .279/.401/.419). Unlike Rickey, he holds no major records; his 808 steals are good for fifth place, he's 29th in walks, and 44th in runs, while Rickey is numero uno in all three. He never won an MVP award or a Gold Glove, didn't make an All-Star team after that '87 game, and spent his post-35 years as a role player, getting a couple hundred plate appearances per season instead of padding his totals. The Bill James measures place him a bit below average on the Hall of Fame Standards scale (46.8, where 50 is an average HOFer), and short on the Hall of Fame Monitor Scale (90.5, where 100 is an average HOFer).

But from the advanced sabermetric point of view, Raines is a solid Hall of Famer. As I've discussed before, I created a system to analyze this year's Hall of Fame ballot for Baseball Prospectus based on BP's Wins Above Replacement Player numbers (WARP3, the historically adjusted version) in a weighted combination of career totals and five consecutive season peak. The idea behind it is to identify from an advanced statistical perspective what the standards are for the Hall of Famers ("How good are they really?") and then to measure similarly worthy candidates ("Who else meets them?"). By my measures, Raines is well above the standards for both leftfielders and outfielders.

            BRAR  BRARP  FRAA  WARP3   PEAK   WPWT

Raines       876   732    40   127.3   51.7   89.5

AVG HOF LF   766   633   -30   108.2   44.4   76.3

AVG HOF OF   763   645   -16   112.1   45.4   78.7

BRAR, BRARP, and FRAA correspond to Batting Runs Above Replacement Player, Batting Runs Above Replacement Position, and Fielding Runs Above Average, three measures from within Clay Davenport's WARP system. WARP3 is the career total, PEAK is the best five-season stretch, and WPWT is the average of those two figures, which is what I used for ranking purposes. Here's where Raines would place as a leftfielder among the enshrinees; for the hell of it, I'll throw in a couple of mortal locks who are still active:

                 BRAR  BRARP FRAA   WARP3   PEAK    WPWT

Barry Bonds      1522  1387   116   204.3   63.6   134.0

Stan Musial      1416  1213    60   193.6   59.7   126.7

Ted Williams     1435  1317    -5   177.6   70.8   124.2

Rickey Henderson 1226  1051    32   176.6   49.4   113.0

Carl Yastrzemski  992   762    82   149.7   50.8   100.3

Tim Raines        876   732    40   127.3   51.7    89.5

Al Simmons        704   593    86   118.8   50.6    84.7

Ed Delahanty      835   733   -56   116.0   52.1    84.1

Billy Williams    787   626    72   119.7   45.8    82.8

Jesse Burkett     808   685   -92   104.0   44.5    74.3

Willie Stargell   824   665   -54   105.0   40.3    72.7

Joe Medwick       637   519    35    96.2   48.0    72.1

Goose Goslin      684   548   -28    99.9   42.9    71.4

Fred Clarke       701   561   -24   104.4   37.8    71.1

Joe Kelley        590   480   -50    88.2   45.5    66.9

Ralph Kiner       614   524   -60    77.8   51.2    64.5

Lou Brock         634   466   -66    91.4   36.7    64.1

Jim O'Rourke      638   536  -212    95.9   28.5    62.2

Zack Wheat        603   462   -97    85.0   29.7    57.4

Heinie Manush     508   394   -84    70.7   33.2    52.0

Chick Hafey       376   309   -42    53.0   31.1    42.1

Monte Irvin       212   166    28    34.6   31.4    33.0

Among retirees he's the fourth-best leftfielder of all-time, and when Bonds and Henderson are factored in, he's still sixth. Only nine other Hall of Fame outfielders besides the ones above him can top that weighted score -- Ruth, Mays, Cobb, Aaron, Speaker, Ott, Mantle, Frank Robinson, and DiMaggio. A general rule of thumb: when you don't need to give the others in your class first names, you're in pretty select company.

One of the more interesting things about the above chart is that Raines' peak by this method is higher than Henderson's -- about half a win per year. Henderson is penalized by the five consecutive season method, as his highest WARP3 totals came in 1980, 1985, and 1990, diluting their impact for the purposes of these calculations. Henderson's five best seasons overall total 57.4 WARP3, while Raines' are the same ones shown above. But it's no stretch to say that at his peak he was as good a ballplayer as Henderson, and that he absolutely belongs in the Hall of Fame. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

Will Raines get in? I'm more optimistic after running these numbers than I was before. I think he'll benefit by being championed by statheads and what I'll call the alternative baseball media -- blogs and other outsiders, including Baseball Prospectus' team of analysts -- in a way that, say, Bert Blyeleven (who's every bit as worthy) has not for a couple of reasons. First, by the time he's even eligible, statistical analysis will have four more years of making inroads into the mainstream, whereas with Blyleven, the support has become more popular only as his clock has ticked. Blyleven's been though seven ballots and is inching upward, but ever so slowly; he's now at 35 percent, less than half of the votes required.

Second, unlike Blyleven, a large percentage of those arguing most vehemently on his behalf will be the ones who saw Raines play at his peak, a peak that almost certainly made an impression on voters in a way that Blyleven's may not have. The Expo version of Raines was electric, man, like a giant neon sign that flashed, "One Hell of a Ballplayer!" Pity those who missed him. I think we'll have work to do to convince many of the voters that Raines is a legitimate Hall of Famer, but I suspect more of them will be listening to what we have to say by that time.