Baseball Strike

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In baseball, they call them the dog days of August. Those final few weeks of summer when after four months of jockeying for position, baseball's pennant races start to heat up and things start getting exciting. That's how it should be anyway. But on August 12, 1994, there was no baseball. The players had walked off the job and the baseball strike of 1994 had begun. A little over a month later the baseball owners voted to cancel the World Series for the first time since 1904. It would take countless hours of negotiating, the threat of "scab" players, the intervention of the President over the course of 232 days before the words "Play Ball!" were finally heard again in Major League Baseball stadiums.

On December 31, 1993, baseball's collective bargaining agreement expired. At baseball's winter meetings in January of 1994, the owners managed to agree on a new revenue-sharing formula, but the formula hinged on the player's agreement to accept a salary cap. Over the next several months, the owner's formula and various possible proposals were run past player representatives and on June 14, the owners presented their official salary cap proposal. The proposal offered the players a 50/50 split in revenue in exchange for limiting payrolls to 84-110 percent of the average club's payroll. The owners further proposed for salary arbitration to be eliminated, but now players would be eligible for free agency after four years instead of six, with the added provision that a player's former club can match any offer from another team until the player has six years of service. On July 18th, days after baseball's all-star game, the players rejected the owner's salary-cap proposal. In return, the players had a few proposals of their own. They requested that the owners lower the threshold for arbitration to two years, eliminate the restriction on repeat free agency within five years and raise the league's minimum salary to between $175,000 - $200,000. On July 27, the player's proposal was promptly rejected. The following day, the player's union voted unanimously to set August 12, as the strike date. And when that day arrived, strike they did.

Bargaining sessions continued into September under the guidance of federal mediators. Commissioner Bud Selig, also the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, named September 9, as the tentative deadline for canceling the season if there was no agreement in place by that date. On September 8, the player's proposed their own revenue-sharing plan that would call for a one and a half percent tax on the revenue of the league's 16 largest clubs, money that would be evenly distributed amongst the smaller 10 clubs. On September 9, the owners rejected that proposal and on September 14, the owners announced the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.