12/22/2023 0 Comments 1994 mlb strike standings![]() ![]() Ponder that line of thinking for a moment.įurthermore, and as I've pointed out before, salary caps do nothing to promote competitive balance - they're simply vehicles to depress labor costs. In either case, the owners were asking the players to give back some of their hard-won freedoms because the owners weren't able to unify. In either case, the desire for greater profits - not a desire for increased competitive balance - was the driver. ![]() That's where the revenue sharing groundswell may have come in - as a way to ameliorate those owners who, say, didn't want to see the Yankees clearing the kind of profits they would clear under a capped system. An alternative theory posits that the owners settled on a desire for a cap first but that small-market owners blanched at the idea of their large-market peers pocketing all that overage. Outwardly, the owners advanced concerns about competitive balance (never mind that baseball's competitive balance "problems" in the free-agency era have been illusory), but they were also fretting over an ill-advised national television contract.Īlso, there's an "arrow of causality" question here. What many owners wanted was increased revenue sharing, but the only way they could build a consensus was to promise the anti-revenue sharing block of owners that they, as a collective, would push for a salary cap. This would allow the owners to press for their favored changes, and this - along with whispers of a possible lockout before the 1993 season - was the shot across the bow. ![]() In a sense, it began in late 1992, when the owners, mere months after ousting erstwhile commissioner - and labor realist - Fay Vincent, voted to re-open the 1990 basic agreement (MLB's collective bargaining agreement with the MLBPA) for negotiation a full year before it was set to expire. In reality, it's the owners who should wear the labor stoppage of 1994 as a shame of their own making. The former is a topic for another forum, and the latter is just envy dressed up in populism. There's perhaps some anti-unionism baked into this, and there's also the quaint notion that ballplayers, because they get paid to play a game, should be happy with the riches they have. Many of us tend go with the tidy and lazy "pox on both their houses" approach, seeing no sense in distinguishing between the millionaires and billionaires who afflicted the game. Twenty years hence, though, who should we blame for what happened to baseball in the summer of '94? We didn't get to see just how far the Montreal Expos could go. We were deprived of seeing Tony Gwynn, Matt Williams and maybe Ken Griffey Jr. The strike of 1994 was a lacerating event for anyone who cares about baseball. (USATSI)ġ994 Strike: What if Expos won? | Other hopefuls | Individual chances at history Who’s to blame for what happened in 1994? Hint: The guy above used to number among them. ![]()
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