Baseball, famously known as a sport without a clock, is watching the hours and minutes tick away until Monday.
That’s when the MLB owners, who locked out the players Dec. 2 after the expiration of the sport’s collective bargaining agreement, say the deadline is for a new CBA. If there’s no deal in place by then, the regular-season schedule will be affected.
Opening Day is set for March 31 — the Detroit Tigers would play the Mariners in Seattle — but without four weeks of spring training time, MLB says, that’s impossible. Adding to the deadline pressure, the league says those early games won’t be made up, leaving MLB at risk of its first labor stoppage-shortened season since 1995, and just its fifth ever.
While we don’t know when the lockout will be lifted and big-league ball will be played again, we can look to the past to see how the Tigers fared in those four previous seasons when the clock ran out on labor peace.
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1972: Division champs by a hair
Baseball’s first labor stoppage began over the players’ push for increased payments into a pension plan and a desire for salary arbitration. Teams OK’d a strike on March 15, but it didn’t become official until team reps and alternates voted unanimously to strike on March 31, a week ahead of the scheduled Opening Day on April 6.
The Tigers front office, including general manager Jim Campbell and manager Billy Martin, didn’t take it well, with Campbell fuming to the Free Press, “I think they’re being damn greedy. I’m disgusted with the whole lot of ’em.” Martin, meanwhile, was more concerned with his chances of winning the division: “Right now I feel like I’m in limbo. This really hurts. We were in excellent shape … we were ready to go. This is going to hurt us more than it hurts anybody else because we’re ready right now and we’ve got a lot of older guys who have to play every day to stay in shape.”
The strike lasted less than two weeks, with the owners funding a $500,000 increase in the pension plan and agreeing to salary arbitration. But, in a fit of pique, they declined to reschedule the 86 games from the first week of the season to avoid paying the players for a full 162-game season. Their revenge wasn’t evenly distributed, however; with the season starting on April 15, the Houston Astros and San Diego Padres lost nine games to the cancellations, the Boston Red Sox had seven wiped out while the Tigers lost just six.
Martin’s post-strike worries turned out to be slightly unfounded, too, as the chaos of April continued nearly until the final month of the season, with four teams separated by half a game atop the American League East on Sept. 4. And then Mr. Tiger stepped up: 37-year-old Al Kaline hit .385 with four doubles and four homers over 22 games, as the Tigers went 16-6 when he played (and 1-4 when he didn’t). That included a 2-for-4 day on Oct. 3 at Tiger Stadium, as the Tigers clinched the AL East crown, thanks to having one more win (in one more game played) than the Red Sox. Kaline, whose batting average rose nearly 40 points during the Tigers’ playoff puch, drove in the winning run and caught the final out.
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1981: Bowing out vs. the Brew Crew
Baseball’s next in-season labor stoppage proved much more costly: With talks deadlocked over what compensation teams should receive for losing a free agent — owners wanted only the top 15 players on the 40-man roster of the team signing the free agent protected from heading to the team losing the free agent, while players wanted 36 of the 40 protected — the union went on strike June 12. This time, however, Campbell, still the Tigers’ GM, was a bit less enraged; when asked by the Free Press’ Jim Hawkins on the strike’s first day what he’d do with a free Saturday the next day, he replied with a grin, “I don’t know. I almost said, ‘I’ll probably watch a ball game.’ ”
Campbell wouldn’t have a ball game to watch for nearly two months; the strike finally ended July 31 (with a free-agent compensation system much closer to the players’ final proposal before the stoppage) with a return-to-play date of Aug. 10 and 713 games. The break in the action once again played havoc with playoff races and numbers of games played; the Tigers and Toronto Blue Jays had gotten in 57 and 58 games, respectively, while Cleveland had managed to play just 50. And so MLB created an extra round of playoffs, with the first-half leaders in each division set to face the second-half division winners.
It was a setup that had the potential to help the Tigers, who’d wrapped up the first half with a 31-26 record but 3½ games behind the New York Yankees in the AL East. And indeed, fueled by Kirk Gibson’s .375/.416/.547 second-half line and Dan Petry’s 2.18 ERA, the Tigers went 28-21 to enter their final series of the season, at Milwaukee, a half-game back. Take two out of three, and they’d earn at least a one-game playoff with the Red Sox for the division. Take all three, and no playoff needed. The Tigers … dropped the first two games against the Brewers, giving them the late-season crown. The flop was especially frustrating for Jack Morris; the first-half All-Star had taken a 1-0 lead into the bottom of the eighth only to give up two runs on a missed double play and a sac fly. “We could’ve gone out in a blaze of glory,” said Morris, who would finish third in AL Cy Young voting. “Now it’s just another year.”
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1994: Bad blood and a sudden end
Despite years of complaining by owners — and a round of collusion against free agents such as Gibson, Morris and Lance Parrish that cost players millions of dollars — salaries continued to rise until MLB owners insisted that a hard salary cap, like that of the NBA, and massive economic restructuring (including revenue sharing and earlier free agency, but with more restrictions) was the only way to save baseball. The players, to put it succinctly, disagreed: “If they had facts or any way of even attempting to prove what they’re saying, then we would listen,” Orioles ace Mike Mussina told the Free Press’ John Lowe on Aug. 10, just before the last day of baseball for the summer. “But they have made no attempt to come out with anything that will prove what they are saying. Every meeting, (owners rep Richard Ravitch) brings the same rhetoric. He just brings out a story. He’s like Aesop, but there’s no moral to the fable.”
Baseball came to a halt Aug. 12, with the Mariners’ 8-1 win over the Oakland Athletics, at 12:45 a.m. Eastern time. The Tigers had finished their increasingly dismal-looking season with a 10-5 loss to the Brewers a few hours earlier. The loss left Detroit at 53-62, last in the AL East and 18 games behind the Yankees in the first year of baseball’s six-divison setup. It also left the Tigers with more questions than answers, as the franchise appeared to be pushing longtime manager Sparky Anderson, 60 at the time, out the door.
“I’m going to be OK no matter what happens here,” Anderson told the Free Press. “Look, if the owner isn’t pleased with the way things have been going, then he certainly has the right to make a change. To my knowledge, Mr. Ilitch hasn’t spoken anything. But if he comes out and says he wants a change, who has a better right?”
Anderson wouldn’t manage another game in 1994, but neither would anyone else: With little movement on the salary cap, acting commissioner (and Brewers owner) Bud Selig canceled the remainder of the season, and the postseason, on Sept. 14, saying, “There is an incredible amount of sadness. It is hard to articulate the poignancy of this moment.”
And yet, some Detroiters were able to. Tigers owner Mike Ilitch finally voiced his support of Anderson remaining as manager (in a story that wound up on the fourth page of the Freep Sports section the next day): “I’ve often told my people that business never goes straight up or down. There are peaks and valleys … and this is definitely a valley. We just have to tough it out and deal with it.” And then there was Jerry Linenger, an Eastpoint native who took the big picture view of the team’s 53-62 finish — literally, as he was in orbit about the space shuttle Discovery at the time of the cancellation: “Being a Tiger fan, the way the Tigers were sitting, I wasn’t too disappointed to see that one come to an end.”
1995: Welcome back, and time to say goodbye
The strike continued into the following spring, and the owners decided in mid-January to use replacement players for spring training. It was a meaningful decision on two fronts. First, a month later, Anderson announced he wouldn’t manage the replacements: “I will be back to manage the Detroit Tigers when the regular players come,” Anderson declared despite being under a $1.2 million contract. The team responded by putting him on an indefinite leave, turning to 39-year-old Tom Runnels, who had two years of managing in Double-A.
In New York, meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board filed an unfair practices complaint against the owners, who had already pulled their salary cap plan but in hiring replacements had violated several provisions of the expired collective bargaining agreement. On March 31, U.S. District Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor issued an injunction against the owners, and the players agreed to end the strike. (And somehow, the owners decided against a lockout. Ilitch hardly seemed happy when he told the Free Press, “Well, I think it went well for the fans. That’s all I’m going to say.”)
And so baseball returned, after 232 days and 948 canceled games, on April 26, with every team getting a new 144-game schedule. The Tigers, with Anderson in the dugout, even won their opener, beating the California Angels, 5-4, in Anaheim. Unfortunately for the franchise, little else had changed, and they lost eight of their next 10 games en route to finishing 60-84 (the equivalent of a 68-94 record over a full season). Nor was it an easy run to fourth place in the AL East. Kirk Gibson retired in August after going 28 games without a home run. Lou Whitaker had a career-high .890 OPS but played in just 84 games in his final season. Alan Trammell played in just 74 (though he returned for a 20th season in 1996). And, finally, Anderson retired on Oct. 2, with a simple farewell to the franchise he led for 2,580 games: “I ain’t here no more.”
Contact Ryan Ford at rford@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @theford. Read more on the Detroit Tigers and sign up for our Tigers newsletter.