Leading Man in Second City : Raines Goes to the White Sox After a Lack of Recognition Finally Sours Him on Montreal

Traded on Christmas Eve, Tim Raines seemed to have left Montreal on the run, frustrated by the Expos’ anonymity and angered by criticism of his performance after he agreed to go from leadoff to third in the batting order, a move he thought was in the best interest of the team.

Now back as leadoff hitter for the Chicago White Sox, the rejuvenated Raines is likely to remain on the run, challenging Rickey Henderson for stolen base supremacy in the American League’s intradivisional showdown for the title of baseball’s best leadoff hitter.

“I like that. I like the challenge of it. I think I perform best under the gun,” Raines said. “It’s hard to compare two players in different leagues, but now it’s easier to set it up as a showdown, though I’m not going to say it’s a personal duel as much as a battleof teams.

“I mean, you’ve got the two best leadoff hitters in baseball. Let’s see whose team finishes on top. If Rickey has the better stats but we’re still playing in October, I’ll be happy.”

While Henderson’s Oakland Athletics will be pursuing a fourth consecutive American League pennant, Raines becomes the ignition for a team hoping to prove 1990 wasn’t a fluke.

The White Sox went from 92 losses in ’89 to 94 victories and the third-best record in baseball, nine games behind the A’s in the AL West.

How was it done? Most scientists are still bewildered. The White Sox were ninth in the league in scoring and seventh in fielding. Yet, they won 30 games by one run and had the league’s third-best home record.

Pitching provided a foundation. The White Sox were one of six AL teams without a 15-game winner, but they had five pitchers with 11 or more victories. Manager Jeff Torborg’s swift and shrewd use of a deep bullpen enabled the starters to go as hard as they could for as long as they could, and set up Bobby Thigpen for 57 saves, a major league record.

In their final season in Comiskey Park, Torborg’s club generated a South Side revival by pushing it to the hilt on offense, stealing 140 bases and becoming the first White Sox team since 1902 to have three players with 30 or more steals.

Center fielder Lance Johnson, who batted .285 and stole 36 bases, was generally the leadoff hitter, but his attitude at the plate, according to Torborg, is, “Thou shall not pass.”

He walked only 33 times, had an on-base percentage of .325 compared to Henderson’s .438, and is expected to be a more productive hitter lower in the lineup.

“One of the things Schu and I talked about is that we didn’t want to mess with the chemistry,” Torborg said, referring to new General Manager Ron Schueler, formerly special assistant to A’s Vice President Sandy Alderson.

Torborg continued: “We won 94 games and did it basically on attitude, hustle and enthusiasm. We didn’t out-stat anyone. We try to apply pressure. We live by it, stand by it, but we needed a leadoff hitter to carry it off again.

“Tim fits perfectly with the type of game we play. I’ve told him that he’s our Rickey Henderson, that he’s on his own (as far as stealing bases).”

Raines didn’t come cheaply. Chicago gave up pitcher Barry Jones, who appeared in 65 games and set up 32 of Thigpen’s saves, and outfielder Ivan Calderon, who drove in 74 runs and stole 32 bases.

Torborg said he will probably replace Jones with a committee of relievers, and is hopeful that the acquisition of Raines and Cory Snyder, plus the ongoing development of Sammy Sosa and Frank Thomas, will compensate for the loss of Calderon’s productivity.

Said Schueler: “I had seen the importance of a leadoff hitter during my last three or four years in Oakland, and we considered Raines to be the Rickey Henderson of the National League. We’re not looking for him to steal 90 bases, but 50 to 60 would be fine, and he still gets on base 40% of the time.”

Henderson will enter the 1991 season needing three steals to break Lou Brock’s career record of 938. Raines, 31, has 634 steals and is the all-time leader in stolen base percentage at .857, having been caught only 106 times.

Sitting in the White Sox clubhouse the other day, Raines said he felt reborn, as though he were starting over. He is a .301 career hitter who made the All-Star team seven consecutive seasons and stole 70 or more bases six seasons in a row as the Expos’ leadoff man.

Then, after agreeing to move into the middle of the order as the No. 3 or No. 4 hitter, Raines spent his last three seasons with the Expos in a no-man’s land, his baserunning restricted while lacking the power associated with those positions.

He stole 49 bases last year after seasons of 33 and 41, but after batting .320, .334 and .330 in his last three seasons as the leadoff hitter, his average fell to .270, .286 and .287 as he attempted to be something he wasn’t. In the process, the criticism mounted.

“I didn’t like the idea of making a move that the manager felt would help the team and then being criticized,” Raines said. “After everything I had done for the Expos, people were suddenly on me because I wasn’t hitting home runs or driving in a hundred runs, things I had never done. Just because they felt they could move me around in the batting order, they expected me to be a Jose Canseco or Andre Dawson, and I’m not.

“They even said I was loafing, not hustling, and that I didn’t have the same aggressiveness on the bases. All of that overlooked the fact that you’re not going to be as aggressive batting third, you’re not going to run as much because you don’t want to take the bat away from the No. 4 hitter.

“I stole 49 bases last year and missed a month and a half of the season with a sprained ankle. I haven’t lost any ability or aggressiveness. I just didn’t take as many chances the last three years, but I can pick up where I left off as a leadoff hitter.”

Raines has dealt with adversity. He overcame a drug addiction to become a respected clubhouse leader, and he came back to bat .330 in 1987 after missing all of spring training and the first month of the season as an unsigned free agent caught in collusion.

But as the criticism mounted in Montreal, as the feeling deepened that he would never receive recognition while playing in Canada, Raines said he suggested a trade, even though the Expos said they would return him to the leadoff slot in 1991.

“You can only take so much,” he said. “I didn’t want to go back.”

As a 10-year major leaguer who had spent the last five or more years with the same club, Raines had the right of approval concerning any trade.

The Expos asked him about Kansas City and Boston, and he rejected both--the Royals because he did not want to continue playing on a synthetic surface and the Red Sox because of their reputation as a team that doesn’t run, in a city that harbors racial tension.

The Chicago White Sox?

“The best Christmas present I ever had,” Raines said, his package wrapped in a three-year, $11.5-million contract and made sweeter by the following:

--His belief that the White Sox are a team on the rise and possess a National League brand of aggressiveness.

--The chance to work with noted batting instructor Walt Hriniak and restore the bunt, among other weapons, to his offensive arsenal.

--The opportunity to play in the same city as Dawson, his former Montreal teammate and friend; to watch as an avid sports fan and become acquainted with Michael Jordan, and to finally enjoy the recognition and commercial possibilities of a major media center.

“I’m not going to bad-mouth the city or fans of Montreal,” Raines said. “They were good to me for 10 years, but the bottom line is that it’s a hockey city.

“You could put 30,000 people in the ballpark and hear a pin drop. The fans can be important to a team in a pennant race, but they’re just too laid back in Montreal. They sit there and wait for something to happen instead of helping make it happen.

“I never received any recognition or even one national endorsement offer. I remember in 1979 that Sports Illustrated did a story on Rickey and myself, and we spent hours posing for the cover, but when it came out there was only one guy on the cover and that was Rickey in his Yankee uniform. That’s the way it is when one guy plays in New York or Chicago and the other guy is in Montreal.

“I mean, the recognition isn’t the most important thing to me, but you get to a point in your career when you’ve put up some numbers and you begin to wonder if anyone knows who you are or what you’ve done. It can play on your mind. My goal now is to be on a Wheaties box.”

Raines laughed, something he hadn’t been doing in Montreal, where the most popular sport is played on ice and a frown had become frozen on his face.