The History of the Chicago White Sox - Part 13

 The Sox’s trip to the postseason in 1993 did not go very well. 

Jack McDowell went cold, losing both of his starts against the defending World Series champion Toronto Blue Jays. The rest of the pitching staff didn’t fare much better, allowing 6 or more runs in a game three times. The bats were extremely cold, only hitting .237 as a team. The Sox went down in six. 

All things considered, it wasn’t the worst. The Sox were still young. They’d have more chances. They took the defending champions to six games in this core’s first taste of postseason baseball. They’ll be back. And when they are, they’ll be more experienced and stronger because of it. 

Things weren’t good in the early nineties in baseball. Really, they hadn’t been good in a while. 

All the way back in the Veeck era, we talked about free agency becoming a thing, but only as it related to the White Sox and the “rent-a-player” model of team building. We didn’t talk about what free agency meant for baseball as a whole. 

The owner hated it. 

I mean, they really, really hated it. 

They liked it a lot better when the reserve clause existed, and players could only sign extensions with their current teams. With no one to compete with, players were forced to accept whatever offer the team wanted to give them. Free agency was costing the owners a ton of money. 

Fortunately for them, it didn’t have to. 

Free agency was first created in the mid-seventies, and by the eighties, owners already had some ideas. They made a sort of “gentlemen’s agreement” to not try to poach each other’s players. Players such as Paul Molitor and Jack Morris would hit free agency only to find that no teams were willing to offer them a contract. The only deals that they could find were lowball offers from their current teams. Basically, if everyone pretended that the reserve clause still existed, it did. This happened constantly throughout the eighties, and everyone knew it. A general mistrust and air of animosity had always existed between the owners and the players, but the way free agency was approached by teams in the eighties amplified it. 

It’s called collusion, and it’s illegal in the United States. Illegal enough that a 280 million dollar settlement was awarded to the players in 1990, the same year that Frank Thomas made his debut. 

Speaking of Frank Thomas, he hit his peak in ‘94. He led MLB in runs scored, walks, on base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, and OPS+. He didn’t just clear the 1.000 OPS mark, he flew past it. 1.217. For all that, he got an identical trophy cabinet addition to the previous season. All-star. Silver slugger. MVP. 

It wasn’t just him, though. Nearly everyone on the Sox went nuts in 1994. The recently acquired slugger, Julio Franco, was second on the team in home runs behind Frank, and won a silver slugger award of his own. 

The future hall of famer, Tim Raines, who was well past his prime by ‘94, managed to chip in some veteran leadership and 10 home runs of his own as a steady presence. He, along with Darrin Jackson and Ron Karkovice, helped give the lineup the depth that it needed to properly support Thomas and Ventura. 

McDowell, Fernandez, Alvarez, and first time all-star Jason Bere made up four fifths of one of baseball’s best pitching rotations. Bere even got an MVP vote for his 1994 season, and he was the team’s fourth best starter. 

The ‘94 team boasted the American League’s #3 offense and #1 pitching staff, and by mid august, they were in first place in the A.L. central. For the first time since the late fifties, the sox were a true, nobody-doubts-it, inner circle contender. One of the top teams in baseball with exactly one thing on their minds. A World Series championship. 

Jerry Reinsdorf, though, had something else on his mind. Money.

Reinsdorf was colluding like mad in the eighties, and now, he needed a new way to keep player salaries down. The plan was already underway. In 1992, he and the other owners voted to oust the player-friendly commissioner of baseball, Fay Vincent. Vincent had been a massive critic of the owners for their collusion in the eighties. 

The person that the owners had replace him was one of their own. Bud Selig. Selig had previously been one of the owners implicated most heavily in the collusion scandal. The case of Paul Molitor being forced to return to Selig’s brewers was one of the most public examples of collusion and was a significant factor in the lawsuit. Reinsdorf was arguably the loudest voice among the owners calling for Vincent’s removal and advocating for Selig to replace him. 

In 1993, the owners refused to engage with the players in negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). On December 31st, 1993, the old agreement ran out. In January, the owners unveiled their proposed new CBA. It included a salary cap. The NFL, NBA, and NHL all had salary caps and had for decades, but MLB did not. A salary cap involves a limit on the total amount of money that a team can spend on player contracts. It’s meant to allow for more competitive balance, as it stops rich teams like the Yankees from simply outbidding all other teams for good players. The thing is, it suppresses player salaries. That’s why it’s called a salary cap. 

The owners refused to engage in any negotiations that did not include a salary cap. The players refused to entertain any offers that did. The 1994 season started without a CBA in place, and things grew more tense throughout the season. The owners didn’t make an official offer until June. The players counter-offered in July. When the owners denied the offer in early August, the players went on strike. 

The owners had created a new rule that said that any new CBA would require 75% of owners to approve it. They then created a faction of hardliners who would veto any offer that wasn’t a complete victory for the owners. All that the hardliners needed was 26% of the vote and they could stall negotiations as long as they wanted. I’ll give you one guess what camp Jerry belonged to. 

"You do it by taking a position and telling them (players) we're not going to play unless we make a deal and being prepared not to play one or two years if you have to” - Jerry Reinsdorf. 

Jerry made it clear what his thoughts were. He didn’t get a reputation as a union-buster for nothing. He was prepared to drag this strike out for years if he needed to. 

Federal mediators were involved by this point, and after a three and a half hour negotiating session on August 31st failed to produce a deal, Bud Selig canceled the rest of the 1994 MLB season. There would be no postseason. For the first time since 1904, there would be no World Series. The best White Sox team since 1959 ends their year with a first place finish and no postseason appearance to show for it. 

Reinsdorf didn’t care. 

In November, the owners announced that if the strike didn’t end by spring, they would start the 1995 season with replacement players. This actually made Toronto Blue Jays games be removed from the schedule as using non-union replacements during a strike is illegal in Canada. 

By January, the federal government had gotten even more involved. President Clinton ordered both sides to resume negotiations. They didn’t. A federal arbitrator awarded 10 million dollars to the players as a result of even more collusion. 

In March, the players announced that if replacement players were used in games, they would not end the strike. Detroit Tigers manager Sparky Anderson was put on leave for refusing to manage replacement players. 

The thing that finally ended the strike was the collapse of MLB’s TV deal. Major cable networks weren’t willing to broadcast low quality games featuring replacement players who were terrible at baseball. They were also upset for losing out on postseason broadcasts the previous year. 

The strike finally ended in late March 1995. Future supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor issued an injunction against MLB preventing it from starting the season with replacement players. The owners filed a request to stay the order, which was denied. The owners and players were officially bound to the terms of the expired 1993 agreement until a new deal could be negotiated. Eventually, that deal was negotiated, and it did not include a salary cap. 

The ‘94 players’ strike’s ultimate legacy would be the damage that it did to baseball’s reputation. Attendance plummeted, as did TV ratings. Of course, people wouldn’t forget that the 1994 postseason was canceled. Frank Thomas would not get to continue the best season of his career into the postseason. The best White Sox team in decades wouldn’t get a shot at a championship. 

Jerry didn’t care. 

A small price to pay for a shot at saving money.