Friday Stuff
White Sox Hall of Famer Departures Edition
Monday
This was the date in 2000 when Tim Raines retired for the first time. He was 40 years old, and was coming off what was, by far, the worst season of his long career. He’d been limited to 58 games with the A’s, came to bat only 164 times, and batted .215. He also stole just four bases, a figure he’d exceeded 19 straight years before that, failing to get more than that only in 1979 when he made his big league debut by appearing as a pinch-runner in six games. His legacy was secure and his skills seemed gone. Retirement made a lot of sense.
Part of that legacy isn’t recalled much now. Raines is, of course, most associated with the Montreal Expos. He started his career with them and played there for the first dozen years of his career. That’s where he was at his best, making all seven of his career All-Star teams, leading the league in steals in each of his first four seasons, and winning a batting title while batting a collective .301 with a 132 OPS+. His Hall of Fame plaque features him in an Expos hat, and that’s fitting.
Later in his career, just before that disastrous season in Oakland, Raines spent three seasons with the Yankees as a fourth outfielder. He was great in that role, batting a combined .299/.395/.429 with a 119 OPS+. Despite being in his late thirties he could still run a bit, too, stealing an average of 17 bases per 162 games during his time in New York. The Yankees won the World Series twice in his three seasons there, in 1996 and 1998, giving him the only championship rings of his long career.
But sandwiched between his individual glory years in Montreal and the team glory years in New York were five very good seasons Raines spent with the White Sox. He was traded there between the 1990 and 1991 seasons along with a couple of anonymous throw-in players in exchange for outfielder Iván Calderón and pitcher Barry Jones. That turned out to be a pretty fair deal for both sides.
Calderón had a solid year for the Expos in 1991. He swatted 19 homers, stole 31 bases, and made the All-Star team, and was off to a decent start the following year when he was traded to the Red Sox. Jones had a solid season in the bullpen that year, too, leading the league with 77 appearances, saving 13 games, and posting a 3.35 ERA in 88.2 innings of work. His real value, though, was in being good enough that season that the Phillies traded for him that offseason, sending cash and Darrin Fletcher to the Expos. Fletcher became Montreal’s starting catcher for the next six years, and made the All-Star team in 1994. The Expos got about 8.0 WAR from Calderón, Jones, and Fletcher, plus their combined salaries were just about the same as Raines commanded all by himself.
As for the White Sox, they got roughly twice as much production because Raines totaled 16.6 WAR for them over the next five seasons. His offense dipped a bit to a 113 OPS+, and he missed a lot of time with injuries in the final three years of that stretch, but he was still very good for them. That included hitting .444 for them in the 1993 ALCS. That production came at the cost of a new deal he signed with them, though, one that averaged nearly $4 million annually. That was a lot of money in the early 1990s, and it was a deal the Expos likely never could have afforded.
Alas, while the White Sox were good during Raines’ time there, they could never get further than the ALCS, and lost a chance to make the playoffs in 1994 when the season was washed out by the player’s strike with Chicago sitting in first place in the American League Central. Consequently, I’m not sure Raines’ time in Chicago did much to build his overall legacy. Only his first two seasons there resembled his form from Montreal, and there wasn’t the team success he enjoyed later in New York.
Even so, it was an important deal for the White Sox to make. They were only a year removed from being pretty bad for the last half of the 1980s, and 1991 was their first season in their new ballpark. It was important for them to let it be known that they intended to be a contender for the foreseeable future, and trading for a future Hall of Famer and then signing him to a big contract extension certainly accomplished that.
