They mounted a few efforts at unionization over the years. Not that the players completely laid down in response. If they didn’t like it they could go get a job in a factory or something. Owners dictated if players played, where players played, and how much money the players made.
#1994 MLB STRIKE INTERVIEW PROFESSIONAL#
The Reserve Clause gave teams rights to a player’s services in perpetuity, sapping players of any power they had and of any control they had over their professional lives. , making it part of every single player’s contract. In the first decade or two of professional baseball players freely shopped their services around and made pretty decent money for the day, but in the 1880s the owners imposed the infamous Reserve Clause In the beginning - and for most of the entire first century of professional baseball’s existence - the owners controlled basically everything. Indeed, the 1994-95 strike was, in hindsight, the inevitable product of 30 years of labor battles in which one side grew in strength, from almost powerless to imposingly powerful, over time while the other side was initially dismissive, then caught off guard and then, out of panic, reacted in increasingly desperate and aggressive ways. We’d like to give you a look at why the strike even happened in the first place. To start, though, we’d like to take a deeper dive.
Indeed, later today we’ll have stories about the wonderful 1994 season that was, sadly, cut short, a look back at the players whose careers were cut short by the strike and a look at what was, perhaps, the worst decision in baseball history - the hiring of replacement players in an effort to break the strike - which, thankfully, was never fully carried out. Today, and in the coming days, a lot of stories will be written about what happened in 1994. Thirty years which had already seen numerous skirmishes and at least one protracted battle between the sides but which broke out into full-scale war in August 1994. It was the culmination of nearly 30 years of acrimony between the players and the owners, fueled by distrust, deceit and resentment. The 1994-95 strike, however, was about far more than that. Then, perhaps, a strike could’ve been easily averted. If only it were about the players and the owners not seeing eye-to-eye on a competing set of proposals in a given round of negotiations. If it worked there, why wouldn’t it work in baseball? Why ruin what had been a wonderful, historic season to date with a work stoppage? Why were they striking anyway? The owners said they were going broke! All the owners were asking for was a salary cap, just like football had, and football was thriving. They were millionaires who wanted more money to play a kids’ game than any of the rest of us would see in our lifetimes, the story went. Most people, however, blamed the allegedly greedy players almost exclusively. Most of us who were old enough to pay close attention to the strike at the time probably remember the response to the strike by fans, the media and the general public as, at best, a “pox on both your houses” kind of thing, with the players and the owners both being blamed for the disappearance of the National Pastime. The 1994-95 Major League Baseball Strike had begun. And there would be none for the rest of the season, with nearly 950 regular season games cancelled along with the playoffs and World Series. But on Friday, Aug- 25 years ago today - there were no games at all. Pretty typical for a Thursday, which is often a travel day. On August 11, 1994, there were nine games
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