When it Raines …
Posted: December 12th, 2007 | Filed under: Baseball | 27 Comments »
Second of the BJIP — Bill James Inspired Posts.
Bill has spent a big part of his career trying to find the illusions of context in baseball. For instance, he has spent some time making the sacrilegious claim that Hack Wilson’s seemingly immortal season of 1930 (.356/.454/.723, 56 homers, 191 RBIs, 146 runs) was, in large part, a sign of the times.
It’s funny, Bill is sort of the BASF of baseball ideas. He doesn’t necessarily make the ideas, he makes them clearer. People in baseball have, for a very long time, understood that some stadiums are easier to hit in than others, some batters have more and better opportunities to drive in runs, some pitchers are in better position to win games, some eras are higher scoring than others, etc. These are old ideas. But Bill was more effective than anyone at exploring these ideas, taking the extra steps and bringing them home.
In 1930, Hack Wilson hit .356, yes, but the entire National League that year hit .303 (and the St. Louis Cardinals team hit .314). Wilson actually finished 10th in the league in batting. The league had wound their baseballs tighter and made the stitches smaller. The LEAGUE OPS that year was .808, which is the highest it has ever been.
To give you an idea, the National League OPS in that crazy offensive year of 2000 was .773 – 35 points less.
Wilson hit 56 homers yes, and that did lead the league, but he played in a very good hitters’ park (Wrigley Field). Gabby Hartnett, who hit with moderate power most of his career, hit a career high 37 homers that year in Wrigley. Then again, Wally Berger, in his rookie year, in the much tougher hitting Braves Field, hit 38 homers. Babe Herman hit 35 homers — 14 more than the year before (another huge hitting season in the NL) and double any of his other seasons.
Wilson’s 191 RBIs are, of course, a record, and it still pops out like you’re wearing 3D glasses. But it helps when your ENTIRE TEAM’S on-base percentage is .374 — last year’s Kansas City Royals did not have a single player with 100 at bats who had a .374 on-base percentage. Wilson’s RBI totals were certainly boosted by having Woody English (.335/.430.511) and Kiki Cuyler (.355/.428/.547) hitting in front. Bill ran some numbers and showed that a very good hitter in Wilson’s precise situation could be expected to drive in 190-195 RBIs.
Some people misunderstood — Bill never said that Hack Wilson’s year was ordinary. He thought Wilson was the best offensive player in the NL in 1930 (better for instance than Chuck Klein who hit 386, 40, 170 in the bandbox called the Baker Bowl or Bill Terry who hit .401). He just thought that those obscene numbers were mirages of the time and should be exposed as such.
Yeah, you could say that not everyone agreed. I’ve never asked, but I’m quite sure Bill heard from every member of the Hack Wilson fan club — and you may be surprised how many people are in clubs like that — and he was told quite often how he was disrespecting the great and grand history of the game. Nobody really wants to know that the earth rotates around the sun.
There’s another side, though, to Bill’s search for context. He has, through the years, found numerous players who were unappreciated because of their time and place. Tim Raines may be one of these players — we’ll soon see what the Hall of Fame (and Pozcars) voters think.
Raines played in a very low run-scoring environment. His best years were in the NL was from 1981 to 1990 — ten years, and the league (including pitchers) hit .252 with an on-base percentage of .319.
Raines hit .302 with a .391 on-base percentage during that time. He, of course, was a base-stealing demon — he stole 627 bases in those years and was successful more than 85 percent of the time. His was not a power hitter, of course, but his .439 slugging percentage over those years was quite a bit better than the league average (minus pitchers) of .389 or the SLG of other outfielders (.411.)
He scored 100-plus runs four different times during that stretch (and surely would have once more had it not been for the 1981 strike). And it was hard to score 100 runs then, damned hard in Montreal, where the Expos consistently had trouble scoring runs. Raines was a truly great player in a time unfit for big numbers
He then went to the Chicago White Sox, a couple more mid-range lineups, and he scored 100-plus runs two years in a row. He was an often useful part-time player for the last five or six years of his career — he put up a .395 OBP in 321 at-bats for the legendary 1998 Yanks, for instance. And that was his career.
With Raines, I think, people underestimate his prime. We did not view him as a truly great player at his best. But that was a mistake. He was great. You can look at three brilliant seasons — 1985-87 — when he could have won the MVP. This is where perception crushes reality. He did not get a single first place MVP vote ANY of those years. If he had won the MVP all three of those years (as Bill James believes he should have, for instance), Raines would be a slam-dunk Hall of Famer and viewed in the mainstream as one of the greatest players ever. But the context of the time killed him.
Look at 1985: Raines hit .320, third in the league. His .405 on-base percentage was also third. He was second in runs created, third in OPS+ (despite being a leadoff hitter), second in times on base, he stole 70 bases (and was caught just nine times), etc. He scored 115 runs for a Montreal team that hit .247 and was ninth in the NL in runs scored.
Using Baseball-Reference’s stat converter, Raines’ 1985 numbers in 1930, Wrigley Field, would look like this:
.378/.468/.562, 229 hits, 165 runs in 144 games.
Using Baseball Prospectus’ translated batting states, Raines 1985 numbers look like this:
.347/431/.546, 201 hits, 125 runs, 18 homers, an EQA of .332.
Not bad. Again, many misunderstood. They thought Bill — and the various analysts who have followed him — were trying to CHANGE history. But no, they were just trying to understand it. Put it in perspective. Tim Raines had a great, great 1985 season. But …
Look at 1986. Raines may have been even better. He had pretty much a miraculous season, one of for the ages. He led the league with a .334 batting average, led the league with a .413 on-base percentage, led the league with 130 runs created, led the league in times on base, was second in the league in OPS+, he stole 70 of 79 bases again.
Trouble is, he only scored 91 runs because runs were hard to come by in 1986 and that Expos team could not hit a lick. Hubie Brooks was in the cleanup spot most of the year (Babbling did hit .340/.388/.569 in a half season). The Expos were 10th in the low-scoring NL in runs scored. That lineup was so bad, that Raines — the ultimate leadoff hitter having the ultimate leadoff season — actually hit third for more than half the season.
So, yet again, Tim Raines did not get a single first-place MVP vote. His counting stats did not impress. Mike Schmidt led the league in RBIs. This time, for fun, put the 1987 Raines in Chuck Klein’s Baker Bowl in 1930. B-R converts his stats to: .391/.473/.593 with 21 homers, 85 RBIs, 154 runs scored.
Look at 1987: Raines had almost the same year. He hit .330, had a .429 on-base percentage, he even felt the ’87 home run vibe and knocked out a career high 18. He stole 50 bases and was caught five times. Now, because Tim Wallach and Andres Galarraga had pretty good year, he even had some counting stats. He scored a scary 123 runs in 139 games. For the third straight year, he had the most win shares in the NL.
And you know the rest of the 1987 story — Raines’ friend and mentor Andre Dawson, despite having nowhere near as good a season, banged 49 homers and drove in 137 RBIs and won the MVP award. Raines was happy for the man who had helped him overcome some of his youthful mistakes. Raines always believed in his heart that Dawson was a superior player to him — and no one could ever convince him otherwise. I respect that very much. But I believe Raines was the better player.
Anyway, everyone understands context better now (in large part because of Bill James). People know that hitters will put up bigger number in Coors Field and Fenway Park, and pitchers will look a lot better in San Diego or Los Angeles. People appreciate that the inflated post-strike numbers were just that, inflated numbers, just another phase in baseball history.
Yes, people get it. And yet, I fear too many people won’t get Tim Raines — they won’t see 3,000 hits, they won’t see a career .300 average, they won’t see an MVP award, they won’t see a single, jaw-dropping number like Hack Wilson’s 191 RBIs (though they should see that Raines was, perhaps, the best pure base stealer in baseball history). I hope I’m wrong. Tim Raines was a great player.
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I don’t know…I’ve seen a few writers saying the same kinds of things about Raines. Its giving me hope that people saw the sames things we did.
I grew up on Topps baseball cards, and really studied the stats on the back. 1987 was the first year I really got into it (I got a Wally Joyner rookie card in the first pack I bought and he was a star to me ever since that…funny the things we remember). I found all the players of that time that I thought were good and would right down all of their stats in a note book that I kept…Hits, Runs, SO, BB, 2b 3b, HR, RBI, and Batting Average. Then I would rank each category 1 through whatever with the best number getting a 1 and so on. At the end, I’d tally them all up to find out who the best player in baseball was. I can’t tell you where exactly he ranked in my list or if I even did the math right, but I know that Tim Raines was toward the top of my list every year that I did it.
I wonder if that notebook is still in my parent’s basement…
I loved Tim Raines when I was first following baseball seriously in those 85-87 years, and I’m in total agreement with you, Joe. But I think it’s extremely unlikely the voters will be, in part for a reason you don’t mention: they seem to think in binary fashion sometimes, so in their minds Raines is not as good as Rickey, who will be eligble next year and is a similar player in some obvious ways . . . so Raines doesn’t get in. That, and despite great strides OBP is still not appreciated nearly enough, so that aspect of Raines’s performance, especially prominent in his last few years, won’t be given much credit at all.
Brrrrrrr……IT’S FREAKIN’ COLD IN IOWA TODAY! I think I’ll have to break out my nebutronic interstellar solar radition warmers this evening.
My two cents, Tim Raines, Jr. was good last year in Triple A Round Rock and deserves another shot at the bigs.
Also, the Astros trade today for Miggy Tejada moves them into a good spot. Ed Wade has turned into another Trader Jack by bringing in Kaz Matsui, Michael Bourn and his Identity, and now Tejada. I wish I could make moves like that here on the frozen tundra for some f’ing votes for once in my life! Why do Hillary and Barack get all the love and not me, huh? Obama had Oprah stump for him. Well, watch me this weekend when Leonard Nimoy hits the trail for me. We’re going to fire it up!
As Levi already pointed out, Raines suffers from a comparison to Ricky Henderson. Frankly, he wasn’t as good an offensive player as Ricky, even during the ten year time frame that you’re targeting. You can make the excuse for him that Montreal wasn’t a hitters park but we all know that Oakland isn’t a hitter’s park either and Yankee’s stadium isn’t all that friendly to right handed hitters.
The other thing that stands out to me immediately is that after 1990, Raines only had one season that he played at least 150 games( 1991). Other than 1991, he only managed to play in 140 games one other season(1992). It’s hard to make a HoF case for someone that was a mediocre part-time player throughout his 30s.
Certain images just stick with a player, right or wrong. Sometimes it’s a positive image (Jeter making that head-first dive into the stands), sometimes it’s a negative one.
For other players, some of their deeds don’t stick at all. For instance, let’s say Cal Ripken is sitting in the dugout during a nationally televised game when one of his teammates hits a wicked line drive into the stands. There’s a collective “oooh” from the crowd, so players know someone has been hit, and Ripken pops his head out of the dugout to see what happened. What he sees is a 4-year old boy a few rows behind the dugout, bleeding from the head, his skull fractured by the line drive. Seeing no one taking any real action, Ripken jumps out of the dugout, climbs into the stands, picks up the boy and carries him back onto the field, through the dugout and into the clubhouse where the Orioles’ doctors could treat him. He plays the rest of the game with the little boy’s blood on his uniform, and is later credited by the team doctor with possibly saving the boy’s life.
Now if that happened in real life, I have no doubt that it would have been mentioned in every article about Ripken for the rest of his life. The video of it would be burned into our memories, an iconic baseball image. There would be features about it on SportsCenter. Someone would have tracked down the kid, now an adult, and asked him about those events for a piece on 60 Minutes or whatever ESPN is calling their news magazine show. It might have made Ripken’s Hall of Fame plaque, and certainly would have been cited by the voters in his favor.
Well, on August 7, 1982, Jim Rice actually did that. That’s a true story, but read any review of Rice’s career and it simply won’t be mentioned. An All-Star player saved a child’s life on national TV, during a game, and it’s as if it simply didn’t happen. For some reason, which I can’t explain, it just didn’t stick.
Unfortunately for Tim Raines, the famous image did stick, and it’s not a good one. For a lot of people, their mental image of Raines is of him diving head first on his steal attempts so he wouldn’t break the vile of cocaine in his back pocket. That’s a vivid, ugly image, and he’s stuck with it.
I’m not saying that’s fair, and I’m saying it should keep him out of the Hall of Fame. I’m just saying it is.
Was it a vile vial of crack?
I kept a vial of cheese whiz in my back pocket when I pitched. Also, Bump Bailey of the New York Knights didn’t slide on a close play because he had a cigar in his back pocket and didn’t want to break it. At least that’s what Max Mercy told me.
Raines is a HOF player. Period. Who cares if he is better than Rickey? Why is that even a concern for anyone but some of the HOF voters? And, for all the kvetching about what horrors that Muntreal Astroturf did to Dawson’s knees (Quick one-liner: Why won’t Dawson make the HOF? Because he just couldn’t walk very well…), no one seems to apply the same Monster-Turf ideas to Raines, though, arguably, it would’ve had even more of an impact on “MLB’s Greatest Base Stealer.”
Also noticed that Buster Olney didn’t vote for Raines (though he did vote for Morris and Rice). Yuck…
Vile, vial…..God I hate spelling. Can’t everyone just be hooked on phonics? From now on I’m spelling it V-I-L. Done.
Jacob,
You’re right, it doesn’t matter that he wasn’t as good as Rickey in his prime.
It DOES matter that he played 23 seasons in the big leagues and he STILL didn’t get 3000 hits.
It DOES matter that while he was pretty special through age 30, his last 11 years in the big leagues were not special by any stretch of the imagination.
Does Raines deserve to get in based on his knack for getting on base? His career OBP is #132 all time.
OPS? #326 all time.
Adjusted OPS+? #254 all time.
Offensive Win%? #148 all time
If Raines is a Hall of Famer so is Kenny Lofton who is his #1 comparable.
Craig,
After Joe just went to the trouble of explaining the notion of stats in context, you use unadjusted numbers like career OBP and OPS to justify your position?
“Adjusted OPS+? #254 all time.”
- just above Derek Jeter (whose career number will no doubt slip as he ages)
“Offensive Win%? #148 all time”
- just above Reggie Jackson, Roberto Clemente, and Rickey Henderson
BTW, his other “#1 comparable” is Lou Brock.
Comparing Raines to Rickey Henderson shouldn’t be a knock against Raines. Henderson was the greatest lead-off hitter of ALL-TIME, and is a certain 1st-ballot HOFer. If Raines is even close to that (and he is) he certainly should be in the HOF discussion.
One thing interesting when comparing Rickey and Raines is the quality of the guys batting behind them. Rickey is clearly the superior player (which is not a knock against Raines, of course), but he did get very, very lucky with the people driving him in.
Just a couple cherry-picked examples:
1984: Rickey scores 113 runs on the A’s with the good Carney Lansford and Dave Kingman’s second-best year behind him
1985: Rickey scores 146 runs on the Yankees with Don Mattingly, Dave Winfield, and Ken Griffey batting behind him
1990: Again with the A’s, Rickey scores 119 runs with the good version of Dave Henderson and the Bash Brothers batting behind him. This was the year Rickey put up a 188 OPS+.
1991: McGwire has his bizarre off-year, but Harold Baines picks up the slack and Rickey scores 105 runs.
1996: Rickey scores 110 runs on the Padres with the good version of Steve Finley, a .353-hitting Tony Gwynn, a still-decent Wally Joyner, and Ken Caminiti’s insane 173 OPS+ mash-a-thon
1999: Now with the Mets, Rickey scores 89 runs in 121 games in front of Mike Piazza, John Olerud, Edgardo Alfonzo, and Robin Ventura. Freaking BENNY AGBAYANI put up this line: 286 .363 .525.
OK, he was batting sixth and seventh in only 101 games, but still.
Raines had Carter and Dawson when he was on the Expos, then a young Frank Thomas in Ted Williams-mode when he moved to the White Sox. I’m sure there’s more than that (I haven’t studied this exhaustively), but it seems on first glance that Rickey just was more fortunate in terms of his 2-3-4 and sometimes -5 hitters.
Yes, Lou Brock is his other comparable.
The difference is Lou Brock actually was an everyday player his whole career and managed to amass over 3000 hits as well as being the all-time stolen base leader when he retired.
I understand the context of those statisics perfectly. Raines doesn’t have the counting numbers (despite a 23 year career!) to make the HoF so the case is being made based on how good he was over a certain stretch of his career before he became a part-time player.
If you just want to take a dominant span, well then, guys like Dale Murphy and Jim Rice should be in the hall before Raines.
The other point I’d like to make about Raines, is while a big pitchers park like Olympic Stadium might have negatively impacted Andre Dawson, it seems to me that it was a perfect ballpark for a hitter like Raines.
Take a look at Raine’s splits and you’ll see that his numbers weren’t negatively impacted by playing in Olympic Stadium, in fact it appears to be just the opposite:
For his career he hit .304/.396/.441 and stole 352 of his bases at Olympic Stadium. In fact in 2 of the 3 years that Joe singles out as Raine’s best, Raines had signficantly better home than away splits.
A large ballpark with artificial turf was perfect for his skill set. Which is why some of these ball park based stat conversions are just silly IMHO.
Craig,
Brock has 3000 hits because he didn’t know how to walk – about 400 more hits than Raines, but nearly 600 less walks (in more games played). He may have retired with the most career SB, but ultimately Raines was better in that facet of the game.
3000 hits is IMO a rather silly HoF benchmark – a corollary of the relative pointlessness of batting average, I suppose. Why should a guy be punished because he knew how to draw a BB? Times on base seems to be a much better career counting number – and here Raines beats Brock, as well as 3000-hit HoFers Clemente and Gwynn. (Total aside: ToB, along with his number of extra base hits, are a couple of awesome aspects of Stan Musial’s generally underrated career)
Agreed on the general notion that park adjustments can’t account for every type of hitter… not sure to what degree this applies to Raines.
It should also be noted that Raines’ career was artificailly shortened in his prime years by two work stoppages that cost him parts of three seasons. Go to baseball-reference.com and use the nuetralize stats feature for both Raines and Brock and you’ll find their career games totals are nearly identical – 2607 for Raines, 2621 for Brock. It will also show that Raines’ would have reached base 252 more times by hit or walk than Brock, scored almost an identical number of runs (1719 for Raines, 1729 for Brock), while driving in about a hundred more runs, and hitting about 30 more homers. And playing defense far better than the Lonnie Smith-esque Brock did. Oh yeah, he did all of this while suffering from lupus, too.
I’m not one who thinks Brock should have been a slam-dunk, first-ballot Hall of Famer, but he was. By that standard, the BBWAA should elect Raines as well.
Tim Raines is probably going to be the hitter’s equivalent of Bert Blyleven. who we all know deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. Both men played more than 20 seasons, but finished just short of important milestones (300 wins and 3000 hits.) Neither men made much of a dent in awards season, nor were they really big names when they played. So many voters are willing to overlook the Hall of Fame numbers they put up (3,701 strikeouts, 1,571 runs; 60 shutouts, 808 stolen bases) and the fact that they performed much better statistically than their contemporaries (118 ERA+ and 123 OPS+) and will do everything they can to prevent them from entering the Hall.
Yeah…it’s tragic.
3000 hits is probably the most successful of the three major milestone clubs (4 if you count 3000 strikeouts) in getting people elected to the Hall of Fame. Seriously, everybody with 3000 hits was in the Hall of Fame by 1962, when they started tabulating 1st-ballot data. And everybody that went before the BBWAA after that (with the obvious exception of Pete Rose) made it in on the first ballot. Harmon Killebrew and others had to wait for 500 wins. Don Sutton and others had to wait for 300 wins. But everybody from Stan Musial to Lou Brock to Robin Yount to Cal Ripken Jr. made it in on their first ballot. Obviously, Rafael Palmeiro is going to be another exception, but still…we’re talking 16 people that made it in on the first ballot! Rickey Henderson and Craig Biggio will make it 18!
While 3000 hits virtually guarantees entry into the Hall, I find it more than a bit ironic that the 3 greatest hitters of all time did not achieve that mark (although Bonds will, if he plays next year).
But they did have over 2000 walks to go along with their 2700+ hits…
And I’m not comfortable with anyone making the assumption that Barry is top 3. I’ll grant top 10 without much argument, but Gehrig’s stats are insane, and Bonds isn’t even a career .300 hitter.
Also, you can try to make the argument that his last eleven years were nothing even remotely impressive and that we’re essentially looking at a 10-12 year span of excellence, but that’s essentially what will be looked at for Ken Griffey, Jr., and few will argue against him being first ballot HOF.
His name is mentioned above as a mark against Raines, but I kept thinking this past October that if Kenny Lofton plays even a couple more good seasons (which seems totally possible despite his being 245 years old), we really will have to start looking at him as a possible hall of famer. He’s had a hell of a career.
Though he’s no Raines.
Tim Raines was a very good player. I wouldn’t vote for him, but I have no difficulty understanding why someone else would.
He doesn’t belong in the same paragraph as Rickey, though.
For god’s sake it’s no slight to Tim Raines that he doesn’t measure up to Rickey Henderson. Very few players do. I couldn’t disagree more with the conclusions reached by Craig above.
It you look at the full context of Raines’ candidacy he’s a slam dunk Hall of Famer. He was a far superior player to Lou Brock, just to name one, and had a dominant peak featuring several Hall of Fame years, and arguably could have won 2-3 MVPs as Joe points out in his blog post.
Give the Rock a 1987 month of April (collusion reared its ugly head there something fierce) and maybe even the writers who focus too much on traditional counting stats would have had to wake up and appreciate just how dominant Raines was.
If you click my name, you can see a whole set of articles arguing for Raines.
From 85 to 87, Raines was the man. One year in an abstract in an article called “Rain Delay”, Bill had an imaginary argument as to who the best player in baseball was. He came up with Boggs, and Raines 2nd I believe, but if you go back over the article it really should have been Raines.
My dream is to see Raines and Dawson elected together, but I know I don’t have a lot of support for that.
I’m wondering of your thoughts on Dale Murphy, the only reason I bring this up is because, I believe, is he suffered the fate, as I’m afraid Raines will, a great hitter in a poor offensive era. The same reason Ryne Sandberg, a top 5 2nd baseman alltime, didn’t get into the hall on the first ballot. The reason i thought of it, was because you mentioned that Raines would be a sure HOFer if he’d won an MVP or two. Murphy won 2 in consecutive years and was one of the best players of the era, and yet gets almost no HOF consideration. I guess we can chalk him up to, along with what, I’m afraid is going to happen to Raines, a wrongfull overlook of a non-offense era followed by an extreme era of offense.
Growing up a Cubs fan in North Dakota (we only had WGN and TBS to watch, thus being a cubs fan) I’ve always appreciated the Sandbergs, Dawsons, Murphy’s of the eighties. I’m too young to know enough about earlier times (although I read as much as I can). I’ve done no research on this, but it would be interesting to see, broken down by decades maybe, which era the least amount (at the same time, the most amount) of hall of famers came from. My guess, again without doing any research, the 80’s were the least appreciated time in baseball, as far as great players getting the recognition they deserve.