basestealing

As much as I loved cheering for Andre Dawson, my response to his election to the baseball Hall of Fame is entirely contingent on how it may affect the cause of Tim Raines. I don’t see a clear answer to that question, but I am worried. There is a chance that the attention paid to Dawson may help his old teammate, who reached a level of 30% support on this year’s ballot (up from 23% last year). Since Raines has a stronger statistical case than Dawson, whose on-base percentage is twenty points behind that of every other outfielder in the Hall, the Hawk could now conceivably be used as a stepping stone to Raines’ argument. “If so-and-so is in, what about the better player who was standing right next to him all those years?” (I’m not suggesting that Raines was better every year. But unlike Dawson, he was, at his best, in an elite small group of the very best offensive players in the game.)