Toggle Menu

August 11, 1994: Baseball Players Walk Out On Strike

What ought to be evident by now is that a large part of the fans' hostility toward the players is the result of good old-fashioned anti-unionism.

Richard Kreitner

August 11, 2015

Bud Selig, Commissioner Emeritus of Major League Baseball.(Wikimedia Commons)

Major League Baseball players walked out on strike near the end of the 1994 baseball season. The strike ended early the following April, after the entire previous postseason had been cancelled. The sportswriter Allen Barra wrote about the strike in the Nation of May 1, 1995.

No work stoppage in sports history involves simpler issues: An industry at the peal of its popularity in terms of attendance, ticket sales and local TV revenue—a rapidly expanding industry—forced a strike on a union by demanding that the union induce its members to take pay cuts. Yet once the strike began, many in the press seemed to assume that the union was being “stubborn” in “refusing to negotiate” when in fact the “negotiations” were entirely centered on how much the union was going to give back…. And what ought to be evident by now is that a large part of the fans’ hostility toward the players is the result of good old-fashioned anti-unionism, fueled by resentment at a union composed largely of millionaires who are well aware that their success derives from the fact that never, in its twenty-eight-year history, has a single member crossed the picket line.

To mark The Nation’s 150th anniversary, every morning this year The Almanac will highlight something that happened that day in history and how The Nation covered it. Get The Almanac every day (or every week) by signing up to the e-mail newsletter.

Richard KreitnerTwitterRichard Kreitner is a contributing writer and the author of Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union. His writings are at www.richardkreitner.com.


Latest from the nation