Best Cards: Tim Raines
(This is Best Cards Ever, a never-ending quest to find the single best baseball card of every player.)
In the end, I don’t think he thinks about it that much, because you can’t say “Tim Raines is a Hall of Famer in large part because Jonah Keri might as well have personally visited every voter and convinced them to vote for him” without “Tim Raines is a Hall of Famer.” But ever since all the news about Keri being a crap dude came out last year, part of me wonders if Raines thinks about Keri’s influence on his Hall of Fame campaign with any sort of regret.
Yes, Raines was a deserving Hall of Famer, and it was silly that it took him 10 years to get enshrined. But I don’t think it’s at all controversial to say that he wouldn’t have made it, despite warranting election, without the significant contributions of Keri, to the point that Keri traveled with Raines to the induction and earned a personal thanks. And then, like a year later, Keri was persona non grata pretty much everywhere in light of his arrest on multiple domestic violence charges.
It’s little more than a footnote on Raines’ life and history, but it’s a reasonably significant footnote. I’m sure 95% of the time he’s thinking about his Hall of Fame track, it’s nothing but fond memories. And it’s obviously not Raines’ fault that the guy who touted him so relentlessly ended up (allegedly) committing some pretty serious crimes, taking nothing away from what Raines accomplished. But if I were him, and “Tim Raines Jonah Keri” returned something like 600,000 search results, it would bother me a little.
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Tim Raines
Career: 1979-2002 (MON, CHW, NYY, OAK, BAL, FLA)
WAR: 69.4
Hall of Fame: Took forever, but yes!
I kind of feel bad for spending the intro talking about the Raines-Keri connection, because there is so much more to Raines’ career. He made seven straight All-Star teams, starting with his rookie year. He received MVP votes in seven seasons. He played in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s. He’s fifth all-time in stolen bases, and only playing at the same time as Rickey Henderson (almost 600 ahead of Raines) kept him from being universally seen as (scientifically speaking) “so fucking fast.”
Raines was also a pivotal figure in exposing the bullshit of the MLB owners, one of the main names blocked in free agency by owner collusion after the 1986 season. Raines finished sixth in the MVP voting in 1986, leading the league in batting average and on-base percentage and stealing 70 bases, and despite that got essentially no interest in free agency because the owners were being assholes. He signed back with the Expos almost literally within hours of being able to, joined the team the next day (despite no spring training or practice), and went 4-5 with a triple, homer, walk, three runs, and four RBI. And of course he stole a base. “Great player overcomes crap ownership, has a triumphant return, makes another All-Star team and comes close to an MVP” would be a dang Disney movie.
And that’s not even the most interesting thing about him! Raines had a drug problem for a while early in his career. He was reported to have spent about $40,000 on drugs in 1982, and famously slid headfirst on the bases because there was cocaine in his back pocket. You get that? This dude was an all-time great baserunner who changed his approach to protect his drugs. He reportedly sometimes used between innings. Tim Raines is an absolutely fascinating person.
(As always, thanks to Check Out My Cards for being able to track these down.)
The worst Tim Raines card
1984 Fleer #631
Okay, let’s count the ways this card is awful:
The picture looks like a paparazzi photo where they just raised the camera and snapped without framing anything. Y’all couldn’t crop it even a little? Just “shocked to be here” Tim Raines in the corner of a boring shot? Lazy as hell.
And then the back of the card shows the exact same picture again, only with … I want to say Andre Dawson? It’s hard to tell. But it’s very clearly the same shot, so they basically got one Raines picture, cropped it two different ways, didn’t have him centered in either one, and both look awful.
Is that “Super special star”? “Special superstar”? Superstar special”? I literally don’t know.
Anyone ever talk to the kind folks at Fleer about using white space? Because there is a lot of open pasture on the back of that card. You know, a stat line, a bio, something?
And then there’s that little slogan. “Letting go of the Raines.” I guess the play is that they let him go on the basepaths, but that’s the headline a hometown paper uses when the player gets released. And “Raines” is such a good name for puns. “The King Raines.” “Taking the Raines.” “Free Raines.” “Right as Raines.”
Everything about this card just screams “Well, we were going to end the card set at 630, but they’ve decided to make 631, so we have exactly two minutes to make a new Tim Raines card, and … go!”
Honorable mention
These aren’t the best of his cards. Sometimes they aren’t even that good. But they need to be mentioned one way or another.
1982 Topps #164 (Tim Raines/Rickey Henderson)
In 1981, Raines and Henderson combined for 127 stolen bases (and that was actually a down year for Rickey; he stole 100, 130, and 108 in 1980, 1982, and 1983, but only 56 in 1981). Only one team (Texas) stole that many bases across all of baseball last year. I know, it’s a different game and all, but damn.
1988 Starting Lineup Talking Baseball #22
I know, I make fun of illustrated cards in this space a lot, but come on. It’s like they came up with a good drawing of Raines and then smooshed it with some crappy Photoshop. Dude’s head is nine feet wide!
1993 Stadium Club #43
Like, it’s a fine, exciting picture, sure. But … he’s 100% out, right? I never understand using pictures of guys failing. Couldn’t they have just reframed the picture slightly and made it the Lance Parrish card for that year?
(Searches “1993 Stadium Club Lance Parrish”)
Yeah, guys, come on. That should have been a Lance Parrish card. You messed up.
1993 Upper Deck SP #259
You’re out there, too, Rock. And if I’m not much mistaken, it’s also against the Angels. Stop testing them.
1999 Fleer Tradition – Warning Track #535W
Conceptually, I think of Raines and Jason Giambi as occupying entire different generations of baseball. For the most part, they did — Giambi entered the league in 1995 but didn’t become JASON GIAMBI until 1999, at which point Raines’ career was seriously winding down — but in my head they were even further apart, like Tom Seaver vs. Jacob deGrom or something. Seeing them on the same card (even with Raines clearly looking like an elder statesman) is kind of jarring.
1996 Topps #272
A deep dive where a writer tracks down the exact result of every single baseball card where the batter is looking at the umpire like “You better not call that a strike” is a story I would read. I mean, nobody else would, but it’d be fun.
1990 Topps – Top Active Career Batting Leaders #7
The picture part of the card is fine, it’s whatever. I just want to talk about the hands. How many drafts do you think the artist got before landing on those hands holding that bat? I feel like the answer is either “one” or “like a hundred before they gave up and took the best they had,” with absolutely no in between.
Also, this is more of a Daniel-centric story, but my sister’s first husband was a guy named Roger who was called “Rock” by his friends. He was an enormous tool who I didn’t ever like, and could not have exemplified the nickname “Rock” any less if you had tried — he’s the stereotype of the career student nerd who would get held up by a particularly heavy door. How that came to be his nickname I don’t remember (if I ever knew), but man, every time I see “Rock Raines” now, I think of Roger, and that’s annoying.
And now, the top four Tim Raines cards of all time.
4. 1992 Topps Stadium Club #426
I mentioned this on Twitter (and wrote the silliest damn Sid Bream story ever on the subject), but the early- to mid-‘90s Stadium Club pictures were so far ahead of the rest of the card companies’ offerings that I could legitimately put Stadium Club photos atop almost every player’s list. So this one is striking, attractive, bold. Only problem is that it didn’t really stand out from its peers in that set. But that’s a small issue. Pretty card.
3. 1993 Upper Deck Fun Pack #201
Something about Raines throwing out some hard “You lookin’ at me?” Albert Belle energy on this card amid all the jaunty angles and colors and lines just tickles me to death. It’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop.
We gotta talk about the quiz (question? trivia?) on the back of the card, though. “In 1992, how did Tim show he’s still one of the fastest men in baseball?” What the hell is that? “He ran real fast” is the only reasonable answer to that question. He stole 45 bases. He had 82 infield hits. He had an infield triple (?). He had 41 hits on ground balls. He … had two triples in one game. What the hell, Upper Deck Fun Pack? Who the hell was going to guess that?
2. 2010 Panini Century Collection – Souvenir Stamps Baseball – 3 Cent Centennial of Baseball Stamp Signatures #32
I’ve chronicled several times in this space how I could swear Panini had licensing for logos and such once upon a time, but in the 2000s or 2010s they stopped having it. Some of their workarounds were either amateurish or obvious, rough Photoshopping or awkward cropping. But this? This is glorious. I don’t know if it would work for a non-afroed player, but for Raines it’s beautiful. Add in a gorgeous stamp and an autograph? I want this card. I want this card a lot.
1. 1995 Skybox Emotion #28
Typically, I hate the cards that just toss some random word onto their front, like it’s a motivational poster and a kitten hanging from a branch. And the back-of-the-card blurb here is pretty underwhelming: “Possible Hall of Famer is still putting up solid offensive numbers. Raines has battled injuries over the past few seasons.” It’s like they wrote that while yawning. So this card has some flaws.
But oh, the virtues. Unlike those Angels-outs cards above, this is a clear time when Raines was safe — otherwise he’d have no reason to call time. And he wasn’t barely safe, he was very safe, all the way across the bag and with no defender in the frame. He slid headfirst, his calling card for some strange reasons. You can see his chains, his eyeblack. It’s just the quintessential Rainesiest card you could possibly have. It is perfect.