AMAZING JOURNEY
Hard road to Hall of Fame
When the All-Star Sports edition of the Trivial Pursuit board game first came out in 1983 it included the question: “What Montreal Expos speedster admitted using $40,000 worth of cocaine in the first nine months of 1982?” The answer: Tim Raines. “Now, 35 years later, I hope the makers of the game will revisit that question,” Raines writes in his new book titled Rock Solid: My Life in Baseball’s Fast Lane.
“I’m thinking something along the lines of, ‘What former Montreal Expos speedster overcame drug addiction and went on to enjoy a 23-year major league career that culminated with his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame?’ ”
On Sunday in Cooperstown, N.Y., Raines will become only the third — and possibly last — player inducted into the Hall of Fame wearing an Expos cap, following Gary Carter (2003) and Andre Dawson (2010).
But it never would have happened for Raines if he wasn’t able to beat his cocaine addiction that started after he took the baseball world by storm in 1981, hitting .304 in 88 games during a strikeshortened season with 71 stolen bases. Raines, who was 21, finished second to Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela in National League rookie-of-theyear voting.
That off-season, Raines went back to his hometown of Sanford, Fla., and used cocaine for the first time with some old friends from high school. Raines’s salary with the Expos had just jumped from $35,000 to $200,000, which meant he could afford a lot of cocaine.
Expos fans first found out about Raines’s drug addiction after the 1982 season in articles written by former Montreal Gazette columnist Michael Farber, who earned a National Newspaper Award for sportswriting for his work.
Raines opened up to Farber, telling him he didn’t use cocaine every day, but had spent about $40,000 on the drug and snorted more than 14 ounces of it during the first nine months of 1982, a season in which his batting average dropped to .277.
“A lot of times I got no sleep,” Raines told Farber. “A lot of times I couldn’t even see the ball.”
Raines admitted to Farber he had used cocaine before games in the Olympic Stadium parking lot, during games in the clubhouse between innings, after games in friends’ apartments and in washrooms on team airplanes. “Drug addiction is a disease people have, just like diabetes,” Raines told Farber the first time he ever publicly discussed his drug use. “I had to have it. It was addictive. I was a cocaine user.”
The wheels fell off for Raines after he slept in for a game at Olympic Stadium in late June of 1982, woken by a phone call from the Expos front office wondering where he was. Raines said he was sick and the team sent Dr. Bob Broderick to check on him.
The next day Raines had a 40-minute meeting with team president John McHale and manager Jim Fanning and his road to recovery started to be paved. McHale spent the rest of that summer driving Raines to doctor’s appointments once or twice a week and after the season, the Expos sent Raines to a rehab centre in California, where he spent 30 days, including the first two in detoxification. When Raines spoke with Farber he had been clean for 67 days.
“I’m not worried about my future,” Raines told Farber at the time.
“Just today. Every morning I wake up and say, ‘Tim, you’re not going to do drugs or drink today.’ ”
Raines stayed clean and became a Hall of Famer.
“He figured out his life had gone off the rails and got help from people in that organization, including Andre Dawson, including John McHale,” Farber recalled this week. “John McHale to me is a hero in all this. John McHale knew nothing about drug use … he was the last of the upright people. And although cocaine use in major-league baseball had become rampant at that time, John McHale was from a different time and he had to figure it out. And with the help of Dr. Bob Broderick and others, he did. He tried to be empathetic. It helped when you had an electric kind of player like Raines … you give him more rope than other players. But they got Raines the appropriate help.”
Farber said he was confident Raines could beat his addiction. “He was young,” Farber recalled. “He had Dawson kind of keeping him on the straight and narrow. He seemed over it and he seemed to have turned the corner. I took him and his recovery at face value. Obviously, there are no guarantees. He certainly overcame something and went back to being a great player.
“I think of him fondly,” Farber added. “I liked him as a guy, loved him as a player.”
Farber had some words of advice for Raines at the end of his column 35 years ago.
“Don’t look back to 1982; look ahead,” Farber wrote.
“If this city has any feeling, it’ll meet you halfway.”
On Sunday, four busloads of Expos fans will make the trip from Montreal to meet Raines in Cooperstown.
Maybe Trivial Pursuit will take notice.
Drug addiction is a disease people have, just like diabetes. I had to have it. It was addictive.