Walt Weiss remembers the baseball strike of 1994-95 well. He hopes lessons were learned.
“As difficult as it is when you are in the moment, you have to think about the welfare of the game,” said Weiss, the former Rockies manager who played 14 years in the majors. “Anybody who’s in the game right now has to look at it like we are leasing the game and passing it on to the next generation. Whether you are an owner or a player or a GM or an agent or whatever, you have to realize that you are a caretaker.”
In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 104,000 Americans, MLB and its players are struggling to find a road to salvage the 2020 season. Blocking that path are gigantic issues about money and power — the same ones that brought baseball to its knees 25 years ago.
Bob Gebhard was the Rockies’ general manager in 1994-95 when the players went on strike and the 1994 World Series was canceled. He sees ominous labor clouds on the horizon, especially with a new collective bargaining agreement due following the 2021 season.
“The timing of all of is terrible because of this virus and on the eve of the CBA,” said Gebhard, who now works as a special assistant for St. Louis Cardinals GM John Mozeliak. “There are going to be millions and millions of dollars, maybe billions lost, by the two parties.
“The worst part about it is, even if we play, there are going to be hard feelings. So now they have to sit down and try to put together a four- or five- or 10-year collective bargaining agreement? I just don’t like where this is all headed.”
Meanwhile, the NHL is making plans for a 24-team playoff format this summer. And the NBA is finalizing plans to play out the 2019-20 season at the Disney World Resort in Florida starting in late July.
Baseball? With the deadline of a proposed July 4 re-start looming and a mid-June “spring training” still unscheduled, the owners and players continue to bicker. Just as they did 25 years ago.
Leading up to that strike, they battled over financial concerns, including the idea of a salary cap. Many players said they were being exploited; many owners cried poverty. Unable to reach a compromise, the players went on strike in August and didn’t return to work for 232 days. In one of the bleakest chapters in MLB history, replacement players were brought in during spring training.
Baseball lost so much in 1994 — not just Tony Gwynn’s quest for a .400 batting average, Ken Griffey Jr.’s charge toward 61 home runs, or the Montreal Expos’ best chance for a title — but any semblance of trust between the players and owners evaporated. To some extent, that distrust still lingers.
The strike alienated fans, with the game permanently losing its place as America’s national pastime in many people’s minds.
When baseball finally returned in the spring of 1995 with a shortened 144-game season, fans let the players have it. At New York’s Shea Stadium, three men wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the word “Greed” snuck on the field and tossed $160 worth of $1 bills at the players’ feet.
In 1994, MLB’s average attendance was a then-record 31,256. It was not until 2004 — the first year in which players could be suspended for testing positive for steroids, after almost a decade of drug-fueled home runs — that the average attendance again topped 30,000.
But attendance has steadily declined in recent years. Last year, it was about 68.5 million, approximately 1 million fewer than in 2018 and 14% lower than a high of 79.5 million tickets sold in 2007.
The good news? Thanks mostly to lucrative television contracts, the average value of a franchise has quadrupled since 2010 from $491 million to $1.85 billion, according to Forbes. Even the worst-run organization in the majors, the Miami Marlins, sold for $1.2 billion in 2017.
Because of the pandemic, there likely won’t be fans allowed in the stands if a 2020 season is played, making television MLB’s chief source of income. But if no season is played at all, the owners will take a major hit, at least according to Commissioner Rob Manfred.
“The economic effects are devastating, frankly, for the clubs,” Manfred said on CNN. “We’re a big business but we’re a seasonal business and unfortunately this (coronavirus) crisis began at kind of the low point in terms of revenue. We hadn’t quite started our season yet. And if we don’t play a season the losses for the owners could approach $4 billion.”
But, as was the case 25 years ago, the players aren’t buying into the owners’ plight, believing that over the long haul the owners will be just fine, while the players will lose.
“After discussing the latest developments with the rest of the players there’s no reason to engage with MLB in any further compensation reductions,” Washington Nationals ace Max Scherzer, a key member of the players union’s eight-player subcommittee, tweeted Wednesday. “We have previously negotiated a pay cut in the version of prorated salaries, and there’s no justification to accept a 2nd pay cut based upon the current information the union has received.”
Scott Boras, the most powerful agent in baseball, also fired a salvo at the owners. In an email obtained by The Associated Press, Boras wrote to his clients: “Remember, games cannot be played without you. Players should not agree to further pay cuts to bail out the owners. Let owners take some of their record revenues and profits from the past several years and pay you the prorated salaries you agreed to accept or let them borrow against the asset values they created from the use of those profits players generated.”
Boris noted that major league salaries have been flat for several years, with the opening day average at about $4.4 million since 2016.
The situation has become increasingly hostile, and the war of words and the jockeying for public support is front and center.
“What makes this so different from 1994-95 is that you do have so much more information out there in the public, but it doesn’t mean it’s good information,” said Jeff Huson, now a Rockies color analyst for AT&T SportsNet who played for Baltimore when baseball resumed in 1995. “I do wish that there was not as much talk and I wish a lot of this was being handled behind closed doors.”
In 1995, baseball’s strike effectively ended when Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, then a federal district court judge in Manhattan, issued an injunction against the owners and the use of replacement players on March 31, 1995, two days before the Mets and Marlins were to play the Sunday night regular-season opener. The timing, she wrote, was “important to ensure that the symbolic value of that day is not tainted by an unfair labor practice.”
Things are more complicated this time around. There are gobs more money on the table and a worldwide pandemic eating away at many fans’ own paychecks. Still, one prominent agent believes baseball will find a solution.
“I think they have to, there’s too much at stake,” he said. “There is also give and take — even tough words — during negotiations. It’s almost like the day a player faces salary arbitration. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that gets said. But when push comes to shove, things get settled.”
Weiss, now the bench coach for the Atlanta Braves, remains hopeful that a solution can be found. But as someone who lived through the strike 25 years ago, he has an ominous warning.
“I just know that if we don’t play this year, I feel like it’s going to be crippling for our game,” he said. “There is another CBA around the corner and if we don’t play this year, the little trust that there is between the two sides is going to diminish even more before a CBA comes up. There is no good outcome, in my eyes, if we don’t play this year.”
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