Tim Raines Sr.

Tim Raines went into the Baseball Hall of Fame wearing a Montreal Expos cap, which is exactly right -- that's where the burner who stole 808 career bases built his case. But the only two World Series rings he ever got came from three seasons in a New York Yankees uniform, at the tail end of his career, as a part-time left fielder who barely stole a base at all. Baseball's funny like that.

A Throw-In Deal for a Fading Burner

The Yankees got Raines from the Chicago White Sox on December 28, 1995, for a low-level minor leaguer -- the kind of trade that doesn't get a press conference. He was 36. His legs, the whole reason anyone drafted him a Hall of Famer in the first place, were mostly done (he'd steal a grand total of 12 bases across his entire Yankees tenure, a rounding error next to the 808 he piled up in his prime). What he still had was one of the best batting eyes in the sport and enough professional at-bats left in the tank to matter on a team that was about to matter a lot.

1996: Hurt, Then Healthy at the Perfect Time

A fractured left thumb and a pulled right hamstring limited Raines to 59 games in the regular season, and he hit .284 while he was out there. Not the story. The story is that he got healthy right as October arrived, sharing left field with Darryl Strawberry and scoring nine runs across 13 postseason games. The Yankees beat Atlanta in the 1996 World Series, their first title in 18 years, and Raines had his first ring as a Yankee before he'd even played half a season in pinstripes.

1997: The Best Batting Average Nobody Remembers

Here's a fun one: at 37 years old, in a part-time role, Raines hit .321 for the 1997 Yankees -- the seventh time in his career he cleared .300, and probably the least remembered (nobody was writing "Comeback Player of the Year" columns about a fourth outfielder). He was part of the wildest sequence of that whole season, too. Down 6-1 in the fifth inning of ALDS Game 1 against Cleveland, Raines, Derek Jeter, and Paul O'Neill went back-to-back-to-back, and the Yankees walked away with an 8-6 win. It didn't save the season -- Cleveland won the series in five, on Sandy Alomar's Game 4 homer off Rivera and a Jaret Wright gem in Game 5 -- but for one inning, a part-timer everybody had written off was doing exactly what he'd done for a decade in Montreal.

1998: The Ring on the Best Team Ever Built

Raines got the most playing time of his Yankees career in 1998 -- 109 games, a .290 average, 5 home runs, 47 RBI -- on a team that won 114 regular-season games and went 11-2 in October, losing only twice, both in the ALCS against Cleveland. He wasn't a headline guy on that roster (nobody not named Jeter, O'Neill, or Rivera really was, on a lineup that deep), but he was a professional bat off the bench and in the outfield mix all year, and he'd earned his second championship ring as a Yankee by the time the 1998 World Series sweep of San Diego wrapped up. Not a bad way to close out a three-year stay that started as a throw-away trade.

He signed with Oakland that winter, played a few more seasons around the league, and finished up in 2002. Nineteen years later, in his tenth and final year on the ballot, the writers put him in Cooperstown at 86.0% of the vote -- the reward for a decade of Montreal excellence that had nothing to do with the Bronx. The rings, though? Those are all Yankees.