A Quick Diversion: The Strike of '94

As this blog is for a sports writing class, I've been instructed to write about a topic from baseball's dark ages: the lockout of 1994. We'll get back to basketball later.



It's rare when owners, general managers, players and agents are all on the same page. Such is the case during the 1994 MLB lockout. Little could have been done to prevent this.

Everybody was in the market for something different. The owners were divided between big-market teams (New York, Chicago, Boston) who were against a salary cap and small-market (Kansas City, Minneapolis, San Diego) who wanted one. "Even out the odds," the little guys said. "Give us a chance to land a big fish." The players wanted financial security and freedom.

The big fish, at the time, were the Cecil Fielders, the Barry Bondses, and the Nolan Ryans. But the strike ended up being a part of the owners' own greed. As John Helyar, author of Lords of the Realm, writes: "Still, in some large part, it was the owners' own damned fault... Baseball owners, obsessed with denouncing the overpaid players, never did that. As agent Scott Boras once put it, 'If the players were a can of Campbell's soup, the owners would roll it down the aisle, step on it, kick it, call it overrated and overpriced, and then stick it on a shelf and try to sell it.'"

It also didn't help that baseball didn't have a strong leader. Commissioner Fay Vincent was widely unpopular with owners and his three-year reign did little to solve baseball's vast array of problems: revenue-sharing, salary cap, expansion. With Vincent gone and no suitable replacement in tow (though Bug Selig would eventually take over), those charged with running baseball became those with the most power: the owners.

Nobody wanted a work stoppage; not the owners, not the players and certainly not the fans. Some viewed it as just another bump in the road. Others turned the game off entirely. The strike was especially heartbreaking for fans of the former Montreal Expos, who had the best record in baseball at the time of the strike and seemed poised to be legitimate World Series contenders.

Boy, what bad luck for them. The only other time the Expos made the postseason? 1981, the last time a major strike struck baseball. They haven't really been close since.

15 years later, even in a weakend economy, teams still spend with more aggression than before. Take this year's New York Yankees, who spent over $300 million on three players (pitchers C.C. Sabathia and A.J. Burnett and first baseman Mark Teixiera). Imagine, for a moment, if that money was being shelled out back then? Baseball would be in an uproar. If the work stoppage hadn't occured in '94, it most certainly would have happened by now.

For some, the strike of '94 ruined baseball, but in retrospect, it changed the game forever. Denver (Colorado Rockies) and Miami (Florida Marlins) were awarded with franchises shortly before the strike became official and Phoenix (Arizona Diamondbacks) and Tampa Bay (Devil Rays) got theirs in 1998, just three years after the strike ended. Some teams were reassigned (Milwaukee from AL Central to NL Central; Detroit from AL East to AL Central) and a new collective bargaining agreement gave the players and owners both financial flexibility and options.

In the end, the strike came down to one thing: money. Neither the owners nor the players could adequately agree on finances, thus resulting in the the '94 season to be shortened. Did the owners get too greedy? Maybe. Were they wrong? Maybe.

The strike-shortened season of '94 meant there would be no October baseball. There would be no World Series. Essentially, it was one giant arm-wrestling contest between the owners and the players.

Neither side won. Baseball, as a whole, lost.