Baseball's '94 Strike Proved Inevitable

The 1994 World Series never came. Baseball celebrated no champion. Stadiums stood locked up and deserted. It was a dark time in the history of Major League Baseball.

By the opening of the 1994 season, a labor strike had become inevitable. At that point there was very little anyone could have done to stop it. Like a sprinter racing towards the finish line, the stoppage of baseball could not be impeded.

Many owners cooled on Fay Vincent and he was forced to resign from his position as commissioner before the opening of the 1992 season. Vincent’s absence meant that the labor dispute was now up to Donald Fehr, the players’ representative, and Dick Ravitch, the negotiator on behalf of the owners. A commissioner could not convene to force an agreement to stave off baseball’s strike.

The rocky relationship between Fehr and Ravitch made the situation ever more combustible. Ravitch and the owners had begun drumming up a plan for a salary cap. However, Fehr and the players wanted nothing to do with it.

A schism among players and owners had been forming over the last several decades. The owners had been called out multiple times during the 1980s for colluding to keep salaries lower. In the decades prior to that, players had to fight to eke out meager raises even after all-star seasons and to eventually get the right to become free agents.

Sure, the strike could’ve been avoided in the summer of 1994. But it would have taken a colossal cave in by one of the two sides. The players could have agreed to a proposed salary cap. Owners could have forgot the idea, left salary arbitration alone and decided not to tinker with how much service time players needed to become free agents.

Neither side felt much like budging though. Animosities had become too great for the strike to be avoided. A compromise just wasn’t possible with the current state of the situation.

“They are utterly disorganized and have no plan,” Fehr lamented in John Helyar’s book, Lords of the Realm. “But they’ve created the conditions where things could get out of control.”

Indeed, things did get out of control. Players saw the effects of the salary cap in the NBA and the NFL. They saw New York Giants quarterback Phil Simms and his $2.5 million salary get cut because the team claimed it couldn’t fit him under the cap.

“What the owners are saying,” Fehr said, “is that they’ll do revenue-sharing as long as the players pay for it with a salary cap.”

Thus, the players and owners remained too bull-headed to come together. The owners believed they had leverage—players needed to play to collect their paychecks. The players also believed they had leverage—the owners needed the players to play to collect TV and gate money.

With no progress made towards a collective bargaining agreement, baseball officially went on strike on Aug. 12.

The sides had been divided on the proposals of a salary cap, revenue sharing and the elimination of salary arbitration. More than anything though, deteriorating relations became the biggest factor. Simply put, players and owners did not want to give the other an inch.

Such attitudes, good or bad, necessitated the much-maligned strike of ’94.