The 90s: The strike that changed baseball forever

When we think about baseball labor, everyone instantly goes to 1994 to point fingers. But how did we get there? As we laid out in the 80s episode, distrust between owners and players was bubbling over especially with collusion cases coming to light.

Donald Fehr would be running the show now, Marvin Miller and Curt Flood watching from the sidelines but offering support when needed. On the ownership side, in-fighting led to forcing a commissioner to resign and install one of their own to run the boyhood game: Allan H. "Bud" Selig.

1994 deserves plenty of conversation, and we are far from the only ones who have talked about the strike and its impact on the sport. But this episode really focuses on the before and after of 1994. What if replacement players were actually installed? Could revenue sharing really work between large market and small market teams? How do you get player's salaries back down despite record revenues pouring into the league?

There are only three more episodes planned for the Service Time Podcast, and we hope you enjoy this episode as we enter the high leverage innings of our show.

As always, you can find the articles and stories we mentioned in the episode over on our Substack page, servicetimepodcast.substack.com. You can an also upgrade to a paid subscription to support the program with ad-free listening in the substack app.

Or you can subscribe for free and be notified via email when a new episode drops. Thanks for listening, next month we retrace the missteps by the league and the PA when it comes to steroids and the fallout from the Mitchell Report. The New Millennium arrives in October.

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