It’s early yet — we have another year before the results of the 2007 Hall of Fame voting are announced — but it’s time to start banging the drum for a player who will be up for election for the first time this year, deserves to be inducted on the first ballot, and won’t be. His qualifications are clear: He’s one of the 10 best ever to play his position, he was one of the two best players in the National League for half a decade, and he was a productive player for many years after that. Sadly, Tim Raines doesn’t get the respect he deserves, and if I had to bet, I’d put my money on his never being voted into Cooperstown.

Raines is often thought of as little more than a great base stealer. He was that — he’s fifth all time in steals, led the league four years in a row, and is second all-time in stolen base percentage, showing how efficient, as well a prolific, a thief he was. But he was a great deal more than that — in context, he was simply a dominant hitter.

To get an idea of how good he was in his prime, compare his 1986 season to Manny Ramirez’s 2005 campaign. Raines played in 151 games, with a batting line of .334 BA/.413 OBA/.476 SLG. He hit nine home runs and drove in 62 runs. Ramirez played in 152 games and hit .292/.388/.594, with 45 home runs and 144 RBI. Raines’s on-base plus slugging percentage, adjusted for league average and indexed on a scale where 100 is average, was 146; Ramirez’s was 156. When you account for the fact that Raines stole 70 bases in 79 tries, it’s clear that he was the better offensive performer. The point to note, though, is that even leaving the steals aside, he was a monster — hitting about as well as Carlos Beltran did last year. This wasn’t Raines’s best season, and it wasn’t at all unusual for him; he was this good every year from 1983 to 1987, a period during which Mike Schmidt was his only real competition for the title of best player in the National League.

This kind of sustained peak is, in its own right, a pretty serious qualification for Cooperstown, and Raines has much else to recommend him. He had a long career, playing his first major league ball game in 1979 and his last in 2002. He had many productive years outside his prime, as I’d count up 12 seasons in which he was anything from a solid regular to an MVP candidate, and there were several more in which he was a valuable reserve. Most New Yorkers will remember his great performance as a bench player for the legendary mid-90s Yankees, for instance, and even in his last season, when he hit .191 in 89 at-bats for the Marlins, he mustered up a .351 OBA.

Altogether, I think you’d have to peg Raines as one of the ten best major league left fielders of all time. The top tier includes Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, Rickey Henderson, and Carl Yastrzemski; you can count Stan Musial there, too, although he played more games at first than he did in left. Raines isn’t as good as those players. He compares quite well with every other Hall of Fame left fielder, though. Neither Lou Brock nor Heinie Manush had a peak anywhere near as high as Raines’s, and neither lasted longer. Ralph Kiner wasn’t better at his best and had a very short career. Chick Hafey wasn’t any better than Cliff Floyd. Raines’s peers are Al Simmons, Zach Wheat, Ducky Medwick, Willie Stargell, Goose Goslin, and Billy Williams. Only Simmons and Wheat had more seasons as a productive regular (Williams and Stargell had as many), only Williams and Simmons had as many MVP-type seasons, and most of these players played segregated ball. I’d count Williams and Simmons as better, and Raines as the eighth-best left fielder to play the game; when Bill James ranked the 100 best players at each position several years ago, he also had Raines as eighth on the all-time list.

This is just a thumbnail sketch, but the point can be made this simply: Tim Raines was about as good, in his sixth-best season, as Willie Stargell was in his secondbest, and he had as many good seasons. Does anyone think Willie Stargell isn’t a Hall of Famer? If not, can anyone advance a reason why the better player shouldn’t be elected?

Raines, when it comes down to it, isn’t a marginal candidate. He only had 2,605 hits in his career, but because he drew 1,330 walks, he reached base more often than 3,000-hit men like Brock and Tony Gwynn. He rarely led the league in anything other than stolen bases — he led in average, OBA, and doubles once each, and runs twice — but in his prime, he was playing in Olympic Stadium at Montreal, the worst hitter’s park in the league. He never won an MVP award, but then leadoff hitters pretty much never do.

I’ll return to this subject during the year; Raines was a great player who deserves to get a phone call telling him he’s a Hall of Famer next January. In the meantime, consider this: When you take the whole package — hitting, baserunning, defense, durability, positional value — Manny Ramirez, who’s hit 470 home runs and driven in 1,516 runs in his career, has never had one season that would rate among Raines’s five best. Does anyone think he isn’t a Hall of Famer?

tmarchman@nysun.com