It has to be baseball’s darkest day of the 20th Century, doesn’t it?
After all, the game battled with societal issues like discrimination, gambling, substance abuse and performance enhancement. But this, what occurred 20 years ago Sunday? It was wholly self-inflicted.
“It was a heartbreaking moment,” commissioner Bud Selig told The Post in an interview earlier this week.
It, you probably know, was Selig’s cancelation of the 1994 World Series, a decision prompted by the massive labor dispute that would turn even uglier the subsequent year when 27 teams — bless Orioles managing general partner Peter Angelos for refusing to cooperate — fielded spring-training teams with “replacement players” before the owners and real players put down their dukes. It is the only time in the past 110 years, including this upcoming October, that there was no Fall Classic.
Call this an instance of time absolutely not healing all wounds. Time provides perspective, however, so let’s look: What people, places and things stand out as the long-term losers and winners of 1994’s incomplete October?
(Yes, losers and winners, not the other way around. Because in many cases here, the winners won only because the losers lost first. Furthermore, from an event this terrible, you should lead with the losers.)
Losers
Hawkish owners
There’s no doubt the 1994-95 work stoppage, the eighth for baseball in a 23-year span, became the worst of the bunch because a cabal of aggressive owners wanted to destroy the union and take back the many gains the players had scored. Instead, their actions were ultimately declared to be unfair labor practices, the union remained intact and there hasn’t been a labor-related pause in baseball’s action since.
Just last month, White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, the last of the prominent hawks from that time (besides Selig), tried to mount a coup against Selig’s chosen successor Rob Manfred _ partly because Reinsdorf felt Manfred wasn’t hard enough on the union. Reinsdorf promoted a feeble candidate in Red Sox chairman Tom Werner, and the doves’ candidate Manfred prevailed.
Montreal
The Expos owned baseball’s best record, 74-40, when the players strike began on Aug. 12, 1994. Thus they missed their best chance to reach the World Series, and in ’95, their owners traded away star players Marquis Grissom (to Atlanta) and John Wetteland (to the Yankees) and let native Canadian Larry Walker to go Colorado as a free agent. Thus started a downward spiral that ended only when the Expos bolted their lovely city in the fall of 2004 to become the Washington Nationals.
Buck Showalter and Don Mattingly
While the Expos dominated the National League, the Yankees owned the American League, with a 70-43 mark, as they were cruising toward their first postseason berth since 1981. They qualified in ’95, yet their disappointing Division Series loss to Seattle led Showalter to leave for Arizona and Mattingly for retirement. Both men, with Showalter now managing the Orioles and Mattingly the Dodgers, still are looking for their first World Series appearance. Can this be the year for one or both?
Toronto
The other Canadian team took quite a hit, too. The Blue Jays, two-time defending champions, never enjoyed a bona fide chance to go for a three-peat, although they were 55-60 when the games halted. They drew more than 4 million fans each season from ’91-93, and they haven’t reached 3 million since. Nor have they reached the playoffs, in a related note.
Tony Gwynn and Matt Williams.
Gwynn, who died earlier this year, had a .394 batting average when the strike hit — we still haven’t seen a .400 hitter since Ted Williams’ .406 in 1941. Williams, now the Nationals’ manager, had 43 homers — on pace for 62, which would have topped Roger Maris’ 61 for the single-season record. Oh well.
The Knicks
Remember when Michael Jordan played minor league ball for the White Sox in 1994? He probably was going to return to basketball anyway, eventually. Yet baseball expedited that move with the work stoppage, as Jordan wouldn’t play with the scabs. He spent three-plus more seasons with the Bulls, winning three more titles and ensuring the fruitlessness of Patrick Ewing’s remaining prime years with the Knicks. And the post-Ewing era hasn’t proceeded very smoothly.
Winners
Players Association
If the owners matured from the debacle of 20 years ago, then so too did the players. They began to realize not every offer or suggestion by the owners was rooted in evil. Yet their income and rights continued to grow as the owners finally acknowledged them as true partners in the game’s development.
However, stay tuned for the next round of bargaining in 2016, now that former Yankee and Met Tony Clark heads the union. Will the owners try to capitalize on Clark’s relative lack of experience?
Cal Ripken Jr.
Look, owning the record for consecutive games played, and topping Lou Gehrig to do it, is awesome. Yet there’s no doubt Ripken won the timing award for this milestone. When he played in his 2,131st consecutive game on Sept. 6, 1995, at Camden Yards, Ripken generated the game’s first moment of goodwill since Selig banged the prior year’s World Series. He occupies rare air even now because he’s regarded as a man who “saved baseball.” The other such saviors, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, no longer reside in such rare air, for some reason.
Joe Torre
Showalter probably would have survived the Yankees’ 1995 disappointment had they gone far in 1994. Instead, Torre — dismissed as the Cardinals’ manager in the middle of the ’95 season — stepped into the void at age 55 and oversaw a life-changing, franchise-changing run of four World Series crowns in five years, six pennants in eight years and 12 postseason appearances in 12 years. Torre just got inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and he also wields power as Major League Baseball’s executive vice president of baseball operations.
Washington, D.C.
Our nation’s capital went baseball-less from 1972-2004, and the drought finally ended thanks to the Expos’ demise in Montreal. What if the ’94 Expos had gone far into October? Count the Orioles as second-generation losers, since some of their customer base switched to the Nats.
Sonia Sotomayor
The players came back after Sotomayor, then a U.S. District Court judge, issued a preliminary injunction against the owners that forbade them from starting the season with replacements. Sotomayor therefore deserves credit for blocking a particularly ugly chapter in the game’s history, and the ruling boosted her profile. She became a U.S. Supreme Court justice in 2009.
Bud Selig
Yup, he’s in the winners’ column. Because he hung around long enough to change the script. Because he corralled his owners and engaged his players sufficiently that he can boast of 19 years of labor peace as he prepares for his retirement. Because he helped push the game past this awful time with myriad innovations. Because, frankly, for even those who don’t like him and his job performance, it probably is due more to other actions (or lack thereof, in the case of his relationship with the Wilpons) than what he did 20 years ago.
“I do feel that historians could say, ‘Maybe they had to go through that to get to where they are today,’ ” Selig said. Maybe. Definitely, it carries reverberations all the way to now and beyond.