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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1760928, member: 289"] (This is a continuation of a series on the history of baseball I started two years ago, discussing events and players of each decade, each one covered in two parts and posted every couple of weeks between the SU basketball and football seasons. The original post is dated 3/31/14 and is on page 21 of the archive. I continued until 10/21/14 - page 16- then picked it up again on 4/21/15 - page 12- until my most recent chapter, posted 8/9/15- page 8. i hope to finish it up this summer and then move on to other sports.) MORE LABOR TROUBLES The growing feud between the players and the owners exploded in 1981 into a strike that tore the guts out of the regular season. It was not baseball’s first stoppage of play over its labor troubles. There’s a great article on “The Business of Baseball” in the 1985 edition of Total Baseball, written by Steve Mann. He says there was almost a strike as early as 1969, when the players rejected a contract because they felt it didn’t contain enough in health care, life insurance or pension benefits. Management refused to budge and it appeared spring training would be delayed until a labor lawyer named Bowie Kuhn intervened and calmed everybody down. He did such a good job the owners made him their next commissioner. In 1972 it came time to negotiate a new agreement. The players wanted a pension increase and something that turned out to be more important: arbitration of salary disputes. They got what they wanted but not until the players had missed the first 13 days of the season, which the owners refused to make up because they didn’t want to pay the players for the time they were out. Mann notes that Curt Flood might have been joined by Al Downing in testing the reserve clause in 1970 and by Ted Simmons in 1972 but both relented and signed the contracts the Yankees and Cardinals had offered. From 1973-75, seventeen more players played without a new contract so they could declare themselves free agents. Only two carried the plan to a conclusion: Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith, who went to arbitration and got the reserve clause redefined to allow free agency after one year without a contract, thus creating the modern business of baseball as we know it. Mann: “The owner’s first response was to fire Seitz, (Peter, the arbitrator who made the decision). Then they sent their attorneys around to all of the courts that would listen, trying desperately to appeal the decision. The courts listened but did not heed the call. Every appeal was rejected, the last one coming in March 1976. Spring Training had not begun. The owners had locked the players out. Another delay in the start of a big league season was looming on the not-too-distant horizon.” But Bowie Kuhn defied the owners and ordered the training camps opened, which forced the owners back to the negotiating table to hammer out a new basic agreement with the union. The owners appointed Ray Grebey, “a gruff and rather arrogant veteran of labor-management wars” head of their Player Relations Committee. After losing in court, the next strategy the owners came up with was to demand compensation for the loss of free agents. The players maintained that this would “undermine the value of free agency” and thus effectively close down the market. Grebey wouldn’t give an inch and the players went on strike on May 29, 1981. It lasted for more than two months, needing July 31, 1981. The owners got limited compensation: for a ‘premium’ free agent, they could choose from a list of ‘unprotected’ players as compensation. This canceled the all-star game and eliminated almost exactly one third of the regular season. There was a heavy amount of negative publicity directed against the players. Higher salaries had alienated them from the fans and they seemed to many to be demanding even more. I recall my father saying with some disgust when the strike was over “We’ll the players got the money they wanted so now they can go back to playing baseball”. Not a single player got more money out of the strike. The structure under which their compensation was determined was altered slightly. Sports Illustrated went farther than that with a cover story headlined: "Strike! The Walkout the Owners Provoked." But the owners were far from done. [/QUOTE]

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