On Sunday, Tim Raines will finally be enshrined in Cooperstown as he is officially inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. In a TSN.ca story originally featured this past January, Sports Illustrated writer and TSN contributor Michael Farber looks at a long-overdue recognition for 'Rock,' who played the first 12 seasons of his 23-year career with the Montreal Expos.

---

Rock made it to the hard place.



After nine years with his nose pressed to the window, Tim Raines – Rock to his friends, his teammates and this country – was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his final year of eligibility, a benediction for a glorious career and the ultimate triumph of metrics in a sport that worships numbers.



Raines was a distinctly 20th century kind of player. He stole bases the way a teenager steals kisses, with palpable joy and madcap abandon. Back in the early 1980s, when stolen bases and hyper-aggressiveness on the bases were pillars of the game, Raines stole at least 70 bases in six consecutive seasons, including a remarkable 90 in 1983. He was principally a leadoff hitter in Montreal but was the de facto anchorman on what former Expos broadcaster Dave Van Horne dubbed the Track Team.



There was Ron LeFlore in 1980 plus Raines, Hall of Fame outfielder Andre Dawson and the dashing Rodney Scott. If the 1970s Canadiens played firewagon hockey, these Expos played firewagon baseball. At a time when the Canadiens dynasty was out of breath, the Expos ruled a city drunk on high-octane baseball. Montreal adored the style every bit as much as it admired the substance of a perennial pennant contender.



But in order to join Gary Carter and Dawson as Expos in the Hall of Fame, this exemplary player from another era had to be viewed through the lens of a 21st century sensibility.



The old benchmarks could not buttress a Hall of Fame argument for Raines, who took walks and finished 395 hits shy of the 3,000 mark. (Obviously 500 home runs was never an option even though the 5-foot-8, 175-pound switch-hitter had enough power that when he was called up from the minors in 1980, manager Dick Williams batted him in the third spot. Raines went 1-for-20.) No, Rock had to be viewed through a different lens, one that offered a clearer view of his value. In the recounting of Raines’ rise to the muscular 86 per cent he received in 2017 – he was named on fewer than 25 per cent of ballots in his first two years of eligibility - you will hear a lot about advanced statistics.

2017 BASEBALL HALL OF FAME VOTING PLAYER VOTES PERCENTAGE Jeff Bagwell 381 86.2 Tim Raines 380 86.0 Ivan Rodriguez 336 76.0 Trevor Hoffman 327 74.0 Vladimir Guerrero 317 71.7 Edgar Martinez 259 58.6 Roger Clemens 239 54.1 Barry Bonds 238 53.8 Mike Mussina 229 51.8 Curt Schilling 199 45.0 Lee Smith 151 34.2 Manny Ramirez 105 23.8 Larry Walker 97 21.9 Fred McGriff 96 21.7 Jeff Kent 74 16.7 Garry Sheffield 59 13.3 Billy Wagner 45 10.2 Sammy Sosa 38 8.6



As Montreal-born baseball author Jonah Keri, who tirelessly plugged Raines as a surefire Hall of Famer, noted, it actually was basic arithmetic. No WAR or OPS+ necessary. You simply add Raines’ career hits and walks and hit-by-pitches you get 3,977, or 22 more times on base than first-ballot guy Tony Gwynn. Rock’s .385 on-base percentage was higher than Willie Mays’, Roberto Clemente’s and Mike Schmidt’s. The Baseball Writers Association of America voters finally validated what your Little League coach used to tell you: A walk really is as good as a hit.



The irony here is that numbers are static and Raines was visceral, a bundle of fast-twitch fibres who would rev up the crowd whenever he put his trailing foot on the carpet near first base. When Joey Votto walks 108 times, that is inert. When Raines walked, it was electric.



One base routinely would turn into two and sometimes three. From his seat in the stands, Keri recalls tingling in anticipation as Raines would taunt the pitcher to throw to first base. On the electronic scoreboard at Olympic Stadium, a cartoon chicken and some henhouse clucking would accompany each toss designed to keep the runner close. “That was so Expos specific,” Keri says of the scoreboard chickens. “You wouldn’t see that in Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium.”



There were so many things that were proprietary to Expos baseball of the era: the scrawny pixelated chickens, tri-coloured caps, the oom-pah band at the Big O entrance and the singing of the Happy Wanderer chorus, Val-de-ri, Val-de-ra. If this were Mickey Mouse, well, it was Montreal’s rodent. And Raines, who would later be part of two World Series winners with the Yankees, belonged to Montreal. He played 23 years in the majors, a career that touched parts of four decades; Raines was in Montreal for each of those decades.



He first arrived as a pinch runner in 1979 when a spate of doubleheaders ruined 95-win Montreal’s chances of overtaking Pittsburgh. He was a seven-time Expos all-star in the 1980s. He was still with Montreal in 1990, when he stole 49 bases and had a .379 on-base percentage. He returned for an extended curtain call in 2001, two years after he had been diagnosed with lupus, and batted .308 in 97 plate appearances and stole the last of his 808 bases.



Raines is not the most important player in the history of the star-crossed franchise – the outpouring of grief over Carter’s death in 2012 was a reminder that no one would ever outshine The Kid – but Raines was the connective tissue, the leitmotif running through Expos history. In 1979 he played with the first Expos star, Rusty Staub, and in 2001 he played with the last Expos star, Vladimir Guerrero, who was named on 71.7 per cent of the ballots and narrowly missed Cooperstown in his first year of eligibility.



The signature moment of Raines’ career occurred in 1987 on an NBC Game of the Week at Shea Stadium. The Expos had begun the decade as the self-proclaimed Team of the 80s, but by then had become the Team of the 80s only because they were likely to reach 80 wins in a season.



In 1986, the Montreal leftfielder had won the batting title with a .334 average and had a National League-leading .413 on-base percentage, winning the Silver Slugger Award. Raines also stole 70 bases. As Exhibit A in the collusion years, no other team wanted to sign this fabulous free agent to a sensible deal. (Reportedly the San Diego Padres offered Rock one year for $1.1 million.) Raines finally came back to Montreal on a three-year, $4.8 million contract, sitting out the first month of the season as required. On May 2, in that indelible debut, he had two singles, a triple, a stolen base and won the game with a grand slam off star Mets reliever Jesse Orosco in the 10th inning, burnishing Raines’ reputation while trashing the concept of six weeks of spring training.



The evidence of the eyes always suggested Raines was a Hall of Famer. Now the sheer weight of numbers — and the willingness to compare, contrast and look at his career from a modern vantage point — has battered down the door. You know the arguments. Raines had a better batting average than Lou Brock. He had a higher 162 per-game WAR rating than Derek Jeter. He was a more efficient base stealer than Rickey Henderson and ranked behind only Henderson as the game’s premier leadoff man.



Now there are no more cases. The only thing left to make is a bronze bust of one of the most thrilling players in baseball history.