Looking Back at the 1990 Lockout

The spring training lockout of 1990 is one of the most obscure disputes in the long stretch of sharp bitterness between MLB players and management from the early ’70s through 1995. As Thomas Boswell wrote just after the lockout ended, “Can anyone remember the details of the baseball strike of 1985, which lasted two days? How about the spring lockout of ’76, which Bowie Kuhn ended by fiat?

“For that matter, do most fans even recall that the ’72 season was shortened by a week because of a strike? No team played more than 156 games that season – yet Steve Carlton won 27 games and had a 1.97 ERA, 30 complete games and 310 strikeouts.

“If history is any umpire, then the lockout of 1990 – all 32 infuriating, unnecessary days – ultimately will be a comparably trivial footnote. At worst, every team will play 158 games this season. That’s enough to avoid an asterisk.”

But, given that the lockout was one of the elements that led to the strike of 1994, it’s worth providing some information and quotes about it. The lockout, which wiped out most of the 1990 spring training, wound up with the owners giving back 17 percent of the salary arbitration concession they won from the union in the 1985 strike by misrepresenting their profits.

After the lockout ended, Commissioner Fay Vincent said: “Whatever damage had been done doesn’t seem to me to be very significant at the moment. People are happy that baseball is about to be played and they are very forgiving.

“I think baseball is fine. I think the fans are supportive and I believe we’ll have a terrific year. The fans are baseball and the best part of baseball is the terrific tie between the game and the American public.

“I worried a lot that we wouldn’t have a season. I worried that the season might be substantially impaired. From where I sit I feel very fortunate for baseball that we avoided any major incursion into the season.”

More ominously, Vincent also said: “I think it’s important that we work month in and month out on labor relations. As you know, the agreement is the most visible part of labor relations but not the most important.

“I don’t think I can say with great confidence there won’t be a problem in four years. All I can say is that if people are bright, and I hope they are, they will work to avoid it.”

Seattle Mariners principal owner Jeff Smulyan added: “Nothing in the negotiations helped baseball in Seattle. Maybe this was a waste of time, but in four years, if the same approach applies, it’s going to be worse than a waste of time, it’s going to be a disaster.

“I’m a student of labor relations, and this wasn’t about a food-on-the-table issue. Negotiations were never elevated beyond the I’ll-get-you position. Everybody lost in this one. You can’t negotiate when your goal is to murder the other guy.”

And Tom Candiotti said: “I don’t think it was worth it. By missing opening day, all it did was create animosity with the fans, owners and players. We’ve got to learn to live harmoniously with each other.”

Bud Selig, then-president of the Milwaukee Brewers and one of the dozen or so owners behind the lockout, claimed: “We’re all sorry for the inconvenience to the fans. We truly hope this is the first step toward a reasonable, more mature relationship between the clubs and the union.” It’s left to the fan to judge whether Selig’s actions over the last 20 years back up these claims.

Boswell commented that “baseball’s labor dynamic is now all too familiar. The owners create an 11th-hour crisis situation for the purpose of testing the union’s solidarity. The union then responds with a spectacularly convincing yawn.

“The owners, certain the union’s resolve is as cold and hard as Marvin Miller’s smile, fold their bluff. The players win a minor victory – in this case a teeny-tiny rollback in salary arbitration eligibility. The fans get their chains jerked big time. And the image of the sport gets a black eye.”

Arne Christensen runs Misc. Baseball , a blog assembling eclectic items about baseball’s history, and 1995 Mariners .