Ask any sports fan their low point of the last decade that didn't involve a bloody glove and Ford Bronco and it would probably involve the 1994 baseball season, the year a player's strike/lockout ended a scintillating campaign and caused the first ever cancellation of the World Series. ESPN, never ones to fall into hyperbole, called this "Armageddon."
There was plenty for fans to be upset about. Padres' outfielder Tony Gwynn was batting .394, threatening to become the first player since Ted Williams to bat .400. Giants' third baseman Matt Williams was challenging Roger Maris' then-untouchable record of 61 home runs.
Most fans saw this conflict as "Clash of the Rich Bastards": greedy billionaire owners versus greedy millionaire players.
The media fed their anger. In the end, the strike was the longest and costliest in sports history, with the game losing a billion dollars in 1994 and millions more as fans turned away from the game in disgust.
I, personally, believe it to be an instance of tremendous solidarity, the culmination of the work of Baseball Union pioneer, Marvin Miller.
There is a tradition in baseball of labor solidarity has remained firm through six work stoppages since 1972 and the Players Unions is recognized as the strongest in the country because they don't give an inch.
In 1967, the average baseball salary was $19,000 a year.
For this to change, players had to reject a tradition of company-run unions and fought to end the reserve clause, which bound a player to a team that drafted them with no rights to go anywhere else. They won the right of free agency and used their solidarity -- and the power of the strike -- to extract wealth from the bosses.
The pioneer of this approach was Major League Baseball union leader Marvin Miller, former United Steel Workers union official who headed up the union in 1966. As Reggie Jackson said, "Miller had more influence on Major League Baseball than anyone ever."
But Miller's genius, I would argue, was that he understood that there was a larger radicalization in society that was thundering into the world of sports. African-American players had been radicalized by the Black Power movement and he courted them to challenge the reserve clause.
In an interview I did with Marvin Miller, he said, "After the Civil Rights Movement, you now had players thinking in terms of what was wrong with the society, and what we could change."
He found such a player willing to stand up in the St. Louis Cardinals' Curt Flood, born and raised in Oakland, who was plenty pissed after making it through a Southern minor league system of segregated hotels and eating out of the kitchen on road trips.
As Miller said, "To me, Flood epitomized the modern player who began to think in terms of union, to ask questions like, 'Why should we be treated like property?' 'Why am I a $40,000-a-year slave?' Basic questions that had gone unasked."
In October 1969, the Cardinals traded Flood to Philadelphia and he said "Maybe I won't go."
He wrote to then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn, "Dear Mr. Kuhn, after 12 years in the major leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system that produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and a human being. I believe that I have the right to consider offers from other clubs before making any decisions. I, therefore, request that you make known to all the major league clubs my feelings in this matter, and advise them of my availability for the 1970 season."
It sounds polite, but at the time, this was akin to Galileo proclaiming the earth to be round.
Kuhn didn't take Flood seriously at all, replying, "Dear Curt, I certainly agree with you that you, as a human being, are not a piece of property to be bought and sold. That is, I think, obvious. However, I cannot see its application to the situation at hand."
As the great columnist Red Smith put it in a beautiful pro-Flood piece: "Thus, the commissioner restates baseball's labor policy any time there is unrest in the slave cabins. "Run along, sonny, you bother me."
Flood won as the union stood with him, but paid a terrible price, was shunned, and cast aside. Yet his example stiffened the spine of generations of ball players reaping the rewards.
Hear the words of Matt Williams himself, who lost a chance at baseball immortality through the strike. "The way baseball players think about it is guys before us have sacrificed to enable us to have a healthy game. We're a strong union because we're all on the same page. We need to keep it that way.''
Miller spoke to this when he said, "Are salaries wonderful? Yeah, but we must remember that it is unity and solidarity and the struggles of the past that made them successful. There is no guarantee that this will continue. And, without a union as successful as it has been, I would predict a downward spiral. The labor movement never stands still.
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