Paul O’Neill had an up-close look at arguably the most damaging work stoppage in baseball history.
In 1994, while O’Neill was leading the league with a .359 batting average in his second season with the Yankees, the players under MLBPA leader Don Fehr went on strike in August, leading the final 50 games of the regular season to be canceled, along with the World Series, the first time the Fall Classic wasn’t played in 90 years.
What resulted was a plunge in attendance the following season, with numbers dropping 20 percent after reaching a record-high before the strike. The league didn’t get back to its pre-strike attendance numbers until a decade later, and now, concerns of the sport’s future linger as the MLB lockout rages on, at nearly three months while the two sides remain far apart in negotiations for a new CBA.
“You don’t want to start the season on a negative note by missing games,” O’Neill said on Tiki and Tierney Thursday afternoon, a day after it was announced that the Yankees would retire his No. 21. “I think if you get players back in camp first week in March, you shorten spring training, which is a little long from an everyday player’s point of view anyway.”
The league has held firm in its stance that if an agreement isn’t made by Feb. 28, the start of the regular season will be delayed. Spring training games have already been put off a week, and significant ground needs to be made up if the 2022 campaign is to start on time.
O’Neill is hoping a deal can be reached by that league-imposed deadline.
“I’m a fan now,” O’Neill told Tiki. “Now that I’m not a player, I do the games and I’m a fan. We need baseball. We want baseball. There’s so much to look forward to as far as some of the young talent on the field now. You just hope this thing gets done and it’s in the rearview mirror so people can enjoy the game of baseball.”
The league’s deadline to make a deal is less than a week away, and while the sides are far apart on a number of issues, but O’Neill is still hopeful that a deal could come at the 11th hour.
“I think you have to realize that players are very strong in the union and have been ever since Marvin Miller changed things in baseball,” O’Neill said. “But negotiations, I don’t understand why, I don’t care if it’s baseball or a traffic ticket, it goes down to the last minute. I think it could be done in a day if they really wanted to, but it will go down to the last minute.”
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