Chumps to Champs

by Bill Pennington

  “We better settle this strike,” Showalter said later. “I don’t know if we’ll have any furniture left with Paul O’Neill in that mood.”

  But the Yankees did not let up, extending their lead in the AL East. On August 3, they won their sixth straight game, which assured them the first-place spot in the division on August 12.

  The team did not pop any champagne afterward.

  “It’s not a celebratory occasion at all,” Mattingly said. “We all want a settlement. We all want a 162-game season. I don’t think anyone in this clubhouse wants an asterisk beside this season.”

  Though not pleased, George Steinbrenner was at least impressed. He had been pleading with Showalter and Gene Michael to do whatever they could to get the Yankees into first place on August 12. Steinbrenner remembered 1981 when a first-place finish on the day of the strike meant an automatic berth in the postseason.

  Steinbrenner, like most at the time, felt sure that even if there was a strike, it would be settled in time to continue with the baseball playoffs and World Series, which had been held every year since 1905. Even two world wars had not disrupted the playing of the World Series. “Our game has some serious issues right now,” Steinbrenner said. “But none of them will be made better by depriving baseball and baseball fans of October playoff baseball.”

  Michael had been the Yankees’ manager in 1981. More than thirty-five years later, he said he approached 1994 just as he had 1981. In both cases, he expected the season would eventually be finished with a World Series champion. “To me, ’81 and ’94 felt the same,” he said. “I kept telling Showalter: ‘Don’t think about the strike. Don’t think about the “what ifs” that other people are throwing out there. Just keep winning. Just pile up the victories, because we’ll need them when we resume the season.’

  “I was convinced and I think Buck was convinced. No World Series? It was inconceivable.”

  On August 11, the day before the strike deadline, Mattingly brought his two sons—Preston, who was six years old, and Taylor, nine—to Yankee Stadium five hours before the scheduled game that night against Toronto.

  Mattingly hit grounders to his kids in the outfield and played catch with them. He wanted them to play on that field at least one more time.

  “This could be my last game,” Mattingly said.

  He did not mean his last game in 1994.

  “Who knows what’s going to happen?” he said. “I may never play again. You never know what’s going to happen.”

  Seated at his locker, Mattingly, whose 6,540 at-bats without a postseason appearance were a franchise record, packed a cardboard box with belongings before the game.

  “Maybe I never play in the World Series or the playoffs,” he said. “If that’s my fate, then so be it. But as much as it makes me sick right now, I don’t think we’re doing the wrong thing by striking. I know it’s not popular with the fans, and it shouldn’t be. But at the same time, fans don’t understand the issues.

  “It’s not about how much money any of us are making. It’s about protecting the future players. Guys older than me went on strike to ensure the generation of players in this clubhouse now—my generation—would have some kind of free agency available to us. I have to do the same thing for the guys coming after us. We have to do what’s right for all the players even if it’s hard right now, since we’re in first place.”

  Mattingly was right that the baseball strike was not popular with fans. The New York Post sent a reporter into the bleachers for that night’s game and heard an earful of animus directed at the players and owners. “These players are very selfish,” said Adam Droz, a twenty-one-year-old college student whose bleacher ticket cost $6.50. “I’ve got no pity for them or the owners.”

  The scene in the Yankee clubhouse before the game looked familiar, except it usually happened in October. Players were exchanging off-season telephone numbers and baggage was being packed. Lockers were emptied and baseballs were being autographed, an end-of-season ritual when each player would customarily take a box of signed baseballs home to donate to charitable causes.

  There were conversations about what to do next. Some players were considering the rarest of things: a midsummer vacation with the family. Danny Tartabull was heading to a beach resort, but would not divulge which one. “I don’t need ESPN following me there to talk about the strike,” he said.

  Wade Boggs wanted to go fishing. Jim Leyritz would return to Florida to finalize divorce proceedings. Showalter also planned to be in Florida. He had promised his daughter Allie that he would drive her to her first day of second grade. “There’s one positive about all of this,” he said.

  The Yankees lost that night’s game to the Blue Jays, their fifth defeat in the last six games. Their record was 70-43. The Yankee Stadium public address system had played several songs that spoke to the mood of the 37,333 in attendance: the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out,” Elton John’s “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” and finally REM’s “The End of the World as We Know It.”

  Lawyers for the owners and representatives of the players’ union did not meet on August 11. Their positions unchanged, they had little to discuss. The strike, the fifth in baseball, began as soon as the last game of the night, Seattle at Oakland, concluded. Ken Griffey Jr. hit his fortieth home run in that game. Earlier, San Diego’s Tony Gwynn had two hits to raise his batting average to .394. San Francisco’s Matt Williams had smacked 43 homers.

  Paul O’Neill’s .359 batting average was the highest in the American League. The first-place teams were the Yankees, Chicago White Sox, Texas Rangers, Montreal Expos, Cincinnati Reds and Los Angeles Dodgers. Montreal had the best record, 74-40.

  George Steinbrenner had the most to lose of any owner, since postseason games in New York generated the largest revenues available in baseball, as well as the most bountiful sponsorship dollars in the next season. He held a small meeting with reporters outside his Yankee Stadium office after the August 11 game.

  He began by insisting he was in solidarity with the owners. He then spent a fair amount of time disagreeing with many of the stances taken by the owners’ chief negotiator, Richard Ravitch, especially the notion that the owners needed a salary cap to restore competitive balance to the game. Ravitch had repeatedly informed the players that without a salary cap, teams from large markets with higher payrolls would dominate smaller-market teams with lesser payrolls. But, Steinbrenner said, “it’s very difficult for Ravitch to argue competitive balance when Montreal, with the second-lowest payroll, has baseball’s best record. I don’t know how that helps the case for a salary cap.”

  A handful of owners sided with Steinbrenner, but the majority did not. A hard-line, influential coalition of owners had drawn a line in the sand. They were tired of giving in and tired of losing at the end of every labor impasse. To them, 1994 would be the year that the owners finally stood together and won meaningful concessions from the players.

  At any cost.

  As Steinbrenner said in a 1998 interview at lunch in his Tampa hotel: “There was a bitterness and a resentment boiling within some owners in 1994. You could not, and would not, change their minds.”

  Showalter was the last player or coach in the Yankee clubhouse on the night of August 11. “I am in a stage of denial right now,” he said as he waited to leave. “Every time I think about closing that door behind me and what might happen after that, I get a lump in my throat.”

  Twenty-four years later, Showalter had no trouble recalling the moment.

  “You know when you think something isn’t real, like you’re having a nightmare?” he asked. “That’s what it was like. I was almost dazed. I walked to my car in the parking lot, and I sat in it for like fifteen minutes. I really thought someone, a security guard or a clubhouse guy, was going to come running out to tell me that there was a settlement and the strike was off. I didn’t want to leave.

  “Eventually, I started the car and headed home. The next thing I remember is waking up in the middle of
the night. I still thought I was having a nightmare.”

  23

  Like a Dagger

  FOR THE NEXT three weeks, the United States Congress, a gaggle of veteran National Labor Relations Board mediators and finally President Bill Clinton each took a crack at trying to facilitate a strike settlement.

  They failed. A year earlier, Clinton had turned the country’s chronic succession of annual federal government budget deficits into a surplus, but ending baseball’s labor strife was too big a task to ask of the president. He threw up his hands and walked away. “I can’t make them agree,” Clinton said.

  In early September, Commissioner Bud Selig announced that the strike would have to be settled by mid-September in order for the season to continue. Selig reasoned that baseball needed at least two more weeks of regular-season games for the division races to be considered credible and worthy of a postseason.

  On September 8, the players’ union suggested the owners try a revenue-sharing plan they had devised. The teams with the highest payrolls would be hit with a 2 percent payroll tax, with the money going to the teams with the lowest payrolls.

  It was a version of a system that Major League Baseball would adopt in 1996 and has kept in place ever since. There is a payroll threshold based on the average payroll of all teams. If a team exceeds the threshold, it pays a penalty.

  In the 1994 players’ union proposal, a portion of all gate receipts would also be shared by every team, leveling some of the revenue imbalances between the haves (Yankees, Dodgers, Rockies) and the have-nots (Brewers, Twins, Expos).

  The owners rejected both pieces of the players’ proposal outright. They had deliberated on it for just a few hours.

  Six days later, on September 14, at a news conference in Milwaukee, Selig announced that the owners had voted, 26–2, to cancel the remainder of the regular season, the two rounds of playoffs and the World Series. “There is a failure of so much,” he said. “And an incredible amount of sadness. Lest anybody not understand, there can’t be any joy on any side.”

  Peter Angelos of the Orioles and Marge Schott of Cincinnati were the two dissenting votes among ownership. Angelos criticized Selig for blaming the players.

  At home in Cincinnati, Paul O’Neill felt disbelief. “Deep down, I never wanted to believe it could happen,” he said in 2017. “Sometimes I still can’t believe it.”

  Michael recalled kicking chairs and tossing a few things around his Yankee Stadium office when he got the news. “I was so hot because I knew one thing right then,” he said in 2017. “I knew that the ’94 Yankees would never be remembered for having won anything. And I was right. But at that moment, it just bothered me so much because that was a special group. It was like raising a family, you know? We had put together a tight unit and watched as they helped each other day after day.

  “It had been only a few years since those embarrassing, losing years, and now we had a team that really should have gone to the World Series. I mean, Jesus, it was a team that was good enough to win the World Series.

  “And then what do we get? Nothing, that’s what.”

  Sitting in a meeting room at the Yankees’ Tampa complex all these years later, Michael still looked wounded as he relived his reaction to Selig’s 1994 news conference. “Like a dagger,” he said.

  Michael had been a scout for the 1977 Yankees and a coach on the 1978 team, both world champions. He was a special adviser for five championship Yankees teams, from 1996 to 2009. Throughout that time, he was known for his even temper, for an easy-smiling countenance.

  Surely, he was asked, all that winning has assuaged his discontent over the cancellation of the 1994 postseason? “Yeah, it helps,” he answered. “But it doesn’t erase it. The ’94 team deserved better.”

  Jim Leyritz would also become a part of two Yankees World Series champions. But looking back, he still feels the ache of what was not accomplished in 1994. “You know how they say you’re only young once?” he said. “A lot of us were young guys who had been through some mighty tough times.”

  Leyritz, after all, had made the outfield error that most directly led to Andy Hawkins’s 1990 no-hitter that ended in a loss. “To us, ’94 was like a payback, and it felt great to be on top,” Leyritz said. “There was a contagious spirit. It was a collection of hungry guys reaching for that brass ring. Not many of us had been able to grab it yet. And that same group, we were never together like that again. We’ll always wonder what we might have accomplished—and how that would have felt.”

  Most Yankees took the cancellation as a personal affront to Don Mattingly. “Knowing that Donnie was on his way to a first postseason game—and to have that stolen from him—that just tore at the rest of us,” Bernie Williams said. “How unfair can something be?” George Steinbrenner said his heart “ached for Mattingly.”

  Mattingly, who had escaped to his hometown of Evansville, Indiana, issued a statement. He conceded the decision was “very difficult for me to accept.”

  Mattingly added: “It is in many ways embarrassing to me that the owners and players are responsible for shutting down an industry that even the act of World War I and World War II couldn’t do. We have failed the fans.”

  Nearly twenty-five years later, Showalter’s recollection of September 14, 1994, is clear. It was nothing like the nightmare he felt he was experiencing about a month earlier. “No, it’s a very real, permanent memory,” he said, sitting in his office at the Orioles’ spring training home.

  In 1994, he had been a thirty-eight-year-old manager, one with blond hair and a youthful, wrinkle-free face. In 2017, his hair was nearly all gray. Wincing, squinting and worrying his way through nearly 2,800 games as a major league manager had carved crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes.

  Showalter watched Selig announce the cancellation of the 1994 season on television. “It’s not at the same level, but it’s like you remember where you were when you heard that President Kennedy or Martin Luther King had been shot,” he said. “I remember sitting at home and listening to Selig. And I was like, ‘My God, this is gonna happen. This is actually gonna happen.’

  “I knew we had a team that could have gone deep in the playoffs. Deep into the postseason. We had the pitching. We had the defense. We had everything you need. It was all set up. So when it all went away, that was devastating. For the fans. For the players. For all the tough times we had gone through. For everybody. Forever.”

  Willie Randolph, who came into the major leagues in 1975, had been through a number of work stoppages. He recalled that two days before Selig’s announcement, a handful of Yankees players had gathered at Hackensack High School in northern New Jersey to work out. “I saw them—running, taking ground balls—that kind of thing,” Randolph said in 2017. “So when Selig canceled everything, I was stunned. To this day I still can’t believe it happened. The strikes, the lockouts, they were always volatile, and I thought I had seen it all. But the game always went on and we got to the World Series.

  “But this time? I’m mean, you can’t cancel the World Series, right? That is a national fixture, part of the American fabric. We were on a nice run. We had a good rhythm as a team and the guys were believing in the process. To have the rug pulled out from us . . .”

  Sitting on a bench next to a practice diamond at the Yankees’ spring training complex, Randolph paused and shook his head. “That 1994 thing still bothers me.”

  Randolph played on two Yankees championship teams and was a coach for four more Yankees teams that won the World Series. “Doesn’t matter, 1994 still stings,” he said. “I was so angry with the whole system and how things went down.”

  Hal Steinbrenner recalled the atmosphere in the Yankees front office. “There wasn’t a smile on anyone’s face for maybe a month,” he said. “There had been so many years that weren’t too exciting at all, and then all of a sudden we could see a glimpse of what could be. And to have that snatched away from you over something that had nothing to do with balls and strikes. That was
really a hard one to take.”

  Steinbrenner could have added that the team offices in the last months of 1994 were missing the forty full-time employees and nearly four hundred part-time stadium workers laid off during the strike. The City of New York estimated it would lose about $100 million from taxes generated and economic impacts from ticket sales, concessions, hotels, restaurants, taxis, parking, luxury boxes and subway fares. The sale of baseball paraphernalia around the country ground to a halt. The Baseball Network, a pioneering joint broadcasting venture of ABC, NBC and Major League Baseball, launched in 1994, all but dissolved. The Baseball Network, the first television network owned by a professional sports league, officially folded in 1995. It took fifteen years for Major League Baseball to reenter the lucrative television market with the MLB Network.

  The strike and cancellation of the playoffs and World Series had left the institution of baseball in America broken. The game’s fans were not so much bereft and grieving as they were inflamed and offended. Baseball’s biggest problem was its own rancorous, divided house, and fans blamed both sides with equal vitriol.

  All the fans in New York knew was that the Yankees’ first shot at the playoffs in thirteen years had disappeared. To the fans in Montreal, where the Expos desperately needed something special to happen to keep the franchise viable, the cancellation of the postseason was like a cruel, callous joke. The Expos, chasing their first World Series appearance, had also not been to the postseason since 1981.

  All around the country, in different but nonetheless painful ways, fans were absorbing a coldhearted punch in the gut. The 1994 season was meant to be the first with one wild-card team from each league qualifying for the playoffs. When the strike started, the team in place to earn the American League wild card was the Cleveland Indians, who had not played a postseason game in forty years. As the leaders of their division, the Texas Rangers were in position to advance to the franchise’s first playoff appearance.