Baseball commissioner Bud Selig will step down this year, lauding all the improvements to the game during his reign. He has taken credit for the wild card playoff format, interleague play, and the importance placed on the All-Star Game.
Each of those three changes has certainly impacted the game, though each also has a downside. Personally though, I like most of the changes that have taken place in the nation’s pastime.
Selig, during his farewell tours this fall, will likely ignore the biggest baseball event that occurred under his reign. In fact, his anniversary is being virtually ignored throughout baseball, which usually goes overboard by celebrating any little milestone in his history.
The subject referenced here, and ignored on fields, stadiums and broadcast booths in every city, is the 1994 work stoppage that ripped fans out of a postseason for the first time in history.
By the second week of August, everyone connected with baseball at the time knew that there would be a delay in the season. However, no one had any idea that the season would end so abruptly.
The last pitch was thrown at 9:45 a.m. in Seattle on Thursday, August 11, when Randy Johnson blew out 15 batters in an 8-1 win over Ron Darling and the A’s. Ken Griffey, Jr. hit his 40th home run, putting him on pace to become the first player in over thirty years to reach sixty in one season.
Matt Williams was on even better pace in the National League, where his 43 bursts in 112 games projected him to finish the season with 61. Even if he fell short, he was a sure bet to surpass Ralph’s league mark of 54. National. Kiner.
Despite individual records that might have been broken, the cancellation of the 1994 season allowed baseball to avoid some embarrassment beyond the lack of postseason play. A look at the final standings would have made the commissioner squirm even more than an All-Star Game that ends in a tie.
Most likely, Bud Selig would have been ready to dismiss the new three-division lineup in each league as a bad experiment. The five teams in the AL East had a better record than the four teams in the AL West, where first-place Texas was ten games under .500. The backlash of having a team make the playoffs with a .456 winning percentage could have caused the leagues to revert to two-division formats, which had been around for twenty-five years.
The Commissioner could also have faced the shame of America’s pastime of belonging to Canada for the third year in a row. Montreal had by far the best record in the majors and seemed to be on its way to winning the World Series, just as its neighbors in Toronto had done in the previous two seasons. A championship that year would have made it much more difficult for Selig and his fellow owners to move the franchise from Montreal to Washington, which they did a few seasons later.
All through that fall and the long winter that followed, baseball fans worried if their favorite sport would ever resume. Then, at 1:14 a.m. on April 26, 260 days after Randy Johnson threw the sport’s last pitch, New York left-hander Jimmy Key threw a strike at the Rangers’ Otis Nixon at Yankee Stadium.
Baseball had finally returned. Bud Selig may want to forget those 260 days from twenty years ago, but he will always tarnish his legacy.
