On Wednesday, the Baseball Writers Association of America announced that Tim Raines will be inducted into the Hall of Fame this summer in his tenth and final year on the ballot. Undoubtedly a deserving candidate, Raines was one of the greatest players of his era and one of the best leadoff hitters in the sport’s history. But right in the thick of Raines’ prime, the switch-hitting left fielder was forced to miss a month of play due to widespread collusion on the part of MLB owners.

Raines won the National League batting title in 1986, led the league in on-base percentage, stole 70 bases while getting caught only nine times, and made the All-Star team for the sixth consecutive year. He had never missed significant time due to injury in his career to that point. He filed for free agency following the 1986 campaign at only 27 years old — the age at which a player is expected to reach the peak of his abilities.

Raines (left) with Vladimir Guerrero at spring training in 2001. (AP Photo)

If a player of Raines’ caliber and age were to hit the open market nowadays, he could count on a massive bidding war culminating in a nine-figure contract. But quite the opposite happened for Raines that offseason: No one besides his old club, the Expos, made him a serious offer. When Raines and Montreal failed to reach an agreement by Jan. 8 of 1987, per the rules of that time, he could not sign with the Expos until May 1. The idea that no team would want to pony up for a future Hall of Famer in the midst of his prime seems so preposterous now that it should stand on its own as evidence of collusion, but the MLB Players Association filed a grievance on behalf of Raines and the others in his situation, and an arbitrator later ruled that team owners had conspired to keep free-agent costs down.

Raines ultimately signed a fairly hefty contract (for the standards of that time) with the Expos on May 1. In an article for the New York Times, Dave Anderson outlined the obvious case for collusion:

For nearly four months, Raines had been out there with several other free agents, available to the highest bidder. But no team truly sought him. The San Diego Padres and the Houston Astros each proposed a contract to the 26-year-old outfielder that was far below the Expos’ final offer. The Seattle Mariners and the Atlanta Braves each approached his agent, Tom Reich, but did not submit a firm offer. And the Mariners’ manager, Dick Williams, best summed up that situation. ”It’ll snow,” Williams said, ”before it Raines.” In assessing the 26-year-old outfielder’s weekend in Shea, it now might be said that when it Raines, it pours gasoline on the bonfire of ”collusion” among major-league club owners not to sign a free agent still wanted by his previous team, as charged by the Major League Baseball Players Association….

The owners supposedly saw the light of ”fiscal responsibility,” a phrase often used by Commissioner Peter Ueberroth to describe the change in the owners’ attitude toward free agents. But the Players Association believes that the owners’ attitude was choreographed, not a coincidence. And the owners have maintained this attitude toward free agents for two years. Following the 1985 season, the owners explained that the free-agent crop wasn’t that good, even though it included Kirk Gibson, who didn’t attract one offer. After the 1986 season, the crop was much better, but the owners either spurned the free agents or drove the price down.

George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ principal owner who somehow misplaced the checkbook he had opened so freely in previous years, will testify soon. So will Ueberroth, who interceded in Roger Clemens’s contract dispute with the Red Sox for the ”good of baseball.” But the commissioner ignored the ”good of baseball” in letting the free agents twist in the wind, punished like so many little kids sent to their room, until May 1.

The weekend at Shea Stadium to which Anderson refers in the first paragraph of the excerpt just so happens to represent one of history’s most badass baseball feats: Raines, after missing all of spring training and the first month of the 1987 because MLB’s mega-wealthy owners didn’t want to pay him what he deserved, returned to action on May 2 and went 4-for-5 with a walk, a triple, three runs scored and a 10th-inning grand slam that sealed the victory for Montreal. Here’s that:

The 1986-87 offseason marked the second of three straight years in which MLB owners were eventually determined responsible for collusion against players. Upon the final settlement of the three cases in 1990, then-commissioner Fay Vincent told owners, “You stole $280 million from the players, and the players are unified to a man around that issue, because you got caught and many of you are still involved.”

One of the primary authors of that collusion, then-Brewers owner and future MLB commissioner Bud Selig, will join Raines in Cooperstown this summer.