We were deprived of seeing Tony Gwynn, Matt Williams and maybe Ken Griffey Jr. take on the forces of history. So the union rightly feared that if the players didn't strike, then the owners would simply declare an impasse and install the economic structure of their fondest dreams. In 1994 approximately the last 50 games of the regular season and the post-season were cancelled due to a player's strike called by the MLBPA and their leader Don Fehr on August 11th. | Other hopefuls | Individual chances at history. 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. We were deprived of seeing Tony Gwynn, Matt Williams and maybe Ken Griffey Jr… The National Labor Relations Board ruled that the owners didn't bargain in good faith, and soon thereafter a US District Court issued an injunction against, yes, the owners. 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.
The strike of 1994 was a lacerating event for anyone who cares about baseball. We lost the World Series. The former is a topic for another forum, and the latter is just envy dressed up in populism. © 2004-2020 CBS Interactive. It didn't go well for the owners. At that point, the owners opted not to make a scheduled pension payment even though they were required to do so. Given the players' pre-existing mistrust of the owners thanks to the collusion scandal less than 10 years prior, this further poisoned the relationship. That's the owners' legacy in all of this -- the sickening, whether cynically or indifferently, of that which they purportedly wanted to cure.

Twenty years hence, though, who should we blame for what happened to baseball in the summer of '94? 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. 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. No union worth its name would accept this kind of retrograde system absent genuine crisis. In either case, the desire for greater profits -- not a desire for increased competitive balance -- was the driver. Indeed, the owners didn't even make a formal proposal to the players until 18 months after they re-opened negotiations. This 18-month rollout set the tenor of things, and this was the anti-free market system players were faced with if they didn't strike. All Rights Reserved. Five things we learned from Games 1 and 2, Rays' Lowe breaks out of slump with multi-HR game, Manfred: Expanded playoffs, extras rule could stay, Betts' brilliant Game 1 includes steals, free tacos, Bellinger hits Game 1 home run, celebrates responsibly, Ex-Astros GM: 'I didn't know we were cheating'. Furthermore, and as I've pointed out before, salary caps do nothing to promote competitive balance -- they're simply vehicles to depress labor costs. Yet it wasn't the hard cap the owners craved, so it didn't lead to any breakthroughs. Since '94, we've had a long run of labor peace after enduring eight labor stoppages between 1972 and 1994. The 1994 Strike was a traumatic event in baseball history. The strike of 1994 was a lacerating event for anyone who cares about baseball. There was -- and thankfully still is -- no salary cap. The strike dragged on, lawmakers found themselves drawn to the blaze, mediators mediated, the owners forced out their lead negotiator, but the sides remained entrenched. 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. So the appeals and legal wrangling began. 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. The owners' first step toward doing this was, upon re-opening negotiations, to ... not negotiate at all. 7:57 am ET, salary caps do nothing to promote competitive balance, some of the proposed changes they finally conjured up, the collusion scandal less than 10 years prior. Eventually, a new basic agreement was forged, one with increased revenue sharing and a steeper luxury tax than the one the players initially proposed, but not before the business end of the '94 season was lost. So, by all means, place the blame for the baseball pyre of 1994 where it belongs: upon the owners. Here are some of the proposed changes they finally conjured up: • Hard salary cap to be phased in over four years;• No more salary arbitration;• Somewhat accelerated free agency timetable, but free agent's current team to have right of first refusal (i.e., right to match other offers and retain player);• Players' share of revenues to be reduced from 56 percent to 50 percent;• Player pensions and health benefits to come out of players' half of revenues;• Players' licensing revenues to be split with owners. The World … section: | slug: 1994-mlb-strike-20th-anniversary-who-was-to-blame | sport: baseball | route: article_single.us | We didn't get to see just how far the Montreal Expos could go. A great many also blame the players. Looking back, there's irony, or at least grim coincidence, in that the owners' disingenuous push for competitive balance cost the small-market Montreal Expos their best shot at a championship. This was an important capitulation by then-MLBPA head Don Fehr because it was something his pioneering predecessor, Marvin Miller, would never have abided.
It was the culmination of nearly 30 years of acrimony between the players and the … CBS Sports is a registered trademark of CBS Broadcasting Inc. Commissioner.com is a registered trademark of CBS Interactive Inc. site: media | arena: mlb | pageType: stories | As presented to the public, they're a ruse, and only a "valet to ownership" kind of union accepts them (looking at you in particular, NFLPA.). 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. Needless to say, the MLBPA shot down the owners' proposal with haste and offered up a largely "status quo" one of their own. 6-keys: media/spln/mlb/reg/free/stories, at Finally, the players propsed a luxury tax system -- softer by degrees than the one we have now but still similar in structure. 1994 MLB Strike 20th anniversary: Who was to blame? Also, there's an "arrow of causality" question here. 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.

The litany goes on and on. We lost the World Series.