The Year Without a World Series: Major League Baseball and the Road to the 1994 Players’ Strike

The 1994 Major League Baseball season promised to be memorable. Long-standing batting and pitching standards were threatened, including the revered single-season home run record. The Montreal Expos and New York Yankees were delivering remarkable campaigns. In August, acting commissioner Bud Selig referred to as a halt to the season amid the League’s contemporary labor dispute. The shutdown led to a lockout in addition to cancellation of more than 900 regular season games, the scheduled expanded rounds of playoffs, and that year’s World Series. Like all labor struggles, it was once fundamentally about keep an eye on–of salaries, of players’ ability to make a decision their very own fates, and of the sport itself.

This book chronicles Major League Baseball’s turbulent ’94 season and its ripple effects. It highlights in advance labor struggles and the roles performed by individuals from John Bernard Law Montgomery Ward, David Fultz and Robert Murphy to Marvin Miller, Andy Messersmith, Jim “Catfish” Hunter and Donald Fehr. Also examined are the ballplayers’ own organizations, from the Players League of the early 1890s to the still potent Major League Baseball Players Association doing battle with team owners and their representatives.