What if MLB’s 1994 labor stalemate never happened?
Every baseball fan old enough will recall those troubling few months, when a potentially historic season -- in the most positive of senses -- suddenly stopped, with the future of the game very much in doubt
My own memories of that dark day, Aug. 12, 1994, remain vivid. Two days before, I had taken residence in a tiny apartment with warped floors, just a couple of blocks north of Wrigley Field. On the back porch, I could sit outside by the rail if a game was in progress and listen to Harry Caray doing the seventh-inning stretch as if he were sitting in my living room.
I didn’t discover that for several months, though, because the last Cubs game that year had been played on my moving day, Aug. 10, a 5-2 Cubs loss to the Giants that featured Matt Williams’ 43rd home run of the season. Wrigley Field would not light up again until the 1995 season finally began, near the end of April, when the Cubs faced the Montreal Expos, a team that no longer exists, in part because of that time.
That September, in the aftermath of Bud Selig announcing the cancellation of the 1994 World Series, the epic Ken Burns documentary “Baseball” premiered on PBS. The context in which the series first ran made it feel like a eulogy.
Thirty-two years later, we revisit the premature end to the 1994 season not as a little bit of nostalgia, or a gentle cautionary tale about the way things once were, but because, with every bit of vitriolic rhetoric that emerges from the current labor negotiations, that time feels as relevant as ever.
What did we lose when the 1994 season was stopped? What might it look like if something like 1994 were to happen again in 2027?
This list isn’t exhaustive, and it’s not intended to dismiss the real issues under discussion then and now. Hopefully, however, it serves as a reminder of what makes us care about all this in the first place.
Lost: Matt Williams’ home run chase
That Williams home run, No. 43 on the season, left him right on pace to match Roger Maris’ single-season home run mark that famously fell just four years later. While Williams was the only one on pace for 61 at that point, several others were close and could have joined the chase.
Each of these sluggers were on pace to reach the 50-home run barrier: Williams, Ken Griffey Jr., Jeff Bagwell, Frank Thomas, Barry Bonds and Albert Belle. At that point, there had been just two 50-homer seasons in the previous three decades -- George Foster (52, 1977) and Cecil Fielder (51, 1990). The record for most 50-homer hitters in a season was two (1938, 1947, 1961). There have been three seasons with four 50-homer guys since (1998, 2001 and 2025), but six?
As for Williams, those 43 homers proved to be his career high. He never hit more than 35 after that.
What if we lose 2027? Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds raised the bar for the single-season record, and it’s now been 25 years since Bonds hit 73. Aaron Judge’s 62 in 2022 set a new American League mark and is the closest anyone has come to Bonds. This season, Judge has been stifled by injury and his streak of two 50-homer seasons will come to an end. He turns 35 next April, one year younger than Bonds was when he set the record. It’s a long shot that anybody, even Judge, will beat 73, but if it’s going to happen for the Yankees’ captain -- even if it’s just breaking his own AL record -- it has to be in the next year or two. A lost or partial 2027 season might be the end of that.
Lost: Tony Gwynn’s quest to hit .400
The closest thing the current game has to Tony Gwynn is the Phillies’ Luis Arraez, and he’s not particularly close to Gwynn. Before Gwynn, there were bat-control masters such as Rod Carew who might pop up on occasion. And some players might make runs at .400 that would fizzle, with George Brett’s .390 average in 1980 the high-water mark between Ted Williams’ .406 season in 1941 and Gwynn in 1994.
Alas, all the failed .400 pursuits after Williams at least got to play out to their natural conclusion. Gwynn’s quest ended at its apex, or second apex, if you will. Gwynn was well over .400 into the middle of May but dropped back to .378 on June 20. From that point to Aug. 11, Gwynn hit .414, and when he reached .394 on that date, his average was at its highest point since June 1. He hit .423 in 28 games after the All-Star break. He was on a trajectory to make a serious run at joining Teddy Ballgame.
It wasn’t just the number though -- .394 -- it was that it was Gwynn doing it. This is what he was, baseball’s best pure hitter, and he was at the absolute peak of his mastery. Gwynn was amid a five-year stretch, beginning with his age-33 season, in which he hit .368. If anyone was going to hit .400, it was going to be him, and even so, everything had to come together. When the strike dropped, it had all come together.
What if we lose 2027? Yeah, this is one we’re probably safe on. I never say never when it comes to hallowed baseball records and milestones. Who can say what sort of innovations, rule interventions and such might come along and send the game in new directions? So maybe there will be more .400 hitters someday. Right now though, the league batting average (.244) is 26 points lower than it was in 1994. Gwynn hit .338 for a 20-year career; Arraez is at .317 and so far has topped out at .354.
Lost: Fred McGriff’s chances at 500 career homers
McGriff wound up in the Hall of Fame, but he needed an era committee to get there, 19 years after he retired. He finished with 493 career homers. In 1994, he had hit 34 when play stopped, just behind the pace set by the six aforementioned mashers who were on track to reach 50 dingers. Given his rate of homers to that point, McGriff would have hit 14 more in 1994 -- putting him comfortably into the 500-homer group years later.
Would that have gotten McGriff into the Hall sooner? Perhaps. Shiny milestones as automatic tickets to Cooperstown don’t hold quite as much sway as they once did. Let’s just say getting there would not have hurt his chances.
What if we lose 2027? Akin to McGriff, losing most or all of a season could hurt the chances of Giancarlo Stanton, Mike Trout, Bryce Harper and Judge to get to 500. It would definitely hinder the chances of Freddie Freeman and Jose Altuve to reach 3,000 hits. That’s to say nothing of the players who are earlier in what might become similar quests, such as Shohei Ohtani, who has 306 homers at age 31.
Lost: The best back-to-back pitching seasons in history
Some might feel that Greg Maddux’s performance in the 1994 and 1995 seasons are already way up the list of best two-season showings. He went 35-8 in those campaigns with a 1.60 ERA, 265 ERA+ and 18.2 bWAR while winning the last two of his four straight Cy Young awards.
And still, it could have been even better. In 1994, Maddux ended up with 25 starts. He had made 35 or more in each of the previous five seasons. If you give him 10 more starts, his 16-6 record might have been something like 24-7. The next season, which was shortened to 144 games per team because of the late start, he wound up 19-2 despite losing four or five starts. Let’s say 22-3. So that’s a two-season total of 46-10, that glowing ERA and over 23 bWAR. Few have done better than that.
The extra 11 wins, if we accept that estimate, would get Maddux to 366 for his career, which bumps him from eighth to fifth on the career list, ahead of Pud Galvin and behind only Cy Young, Walter Johnson, Grover Alexander and Christy Mathewson.
What if we lose 2027? No one is getting near 46 wins over two seasons, but we’ve seen historic-level performances on the mound the past couple of years from Tarik Skubal, Paul Skenes and Jacob Misiorowski. We don’t want to miss a second of these guys while they are healthy and on top of their games. Pitching has changed since the Maddux generation, but part of figuring out the new standards is seeing what the best of the best do when they are at their peak.
Lost: Record attendance
In Maddux’s last start before the strike, which came the day before, he tossed, fittingly enough, a Maddux (a complete-game shutout on fewer than 100 pitches). He blanked the Rockies at Mile High Stadium on four hits while throwing just 94 pitches. The announced crowd that day was 65,043.
This was Colorado’s last season before the opening of Coors Field, so the Rockies were still playing at massive Mile High Stadium, which had a capacity of more than 76,000. In just the second season of the franchise’s existence, people were filling a huge percentage of those seats and the Rockies led MLB with an average of 58,598 fans, a pace of more than 4.7 million for the season. That would have broken baseball’s season record, set by the Rockies the year before.
But baseball overall was hot at the turnstiles. According to Baseball Reference, MLB attendance was on track to break 1993’s record for average attendance: It was at 31,256 at the time of the strike, after 30,964 the year before. When baseball resumed in 1995, the average tumbled to 25,021.
What if we lose 2027? Dodger Stadium’s MLB-high listed capacity is 56,000, so it’s not even possible for a team to match the Rockies’ 1993-94 pace. Still, while baseball’s attendance gradually increased, then went into a period of ebb and flow, it has been climbing annually since the 2020 pandemic season, reaching 29,575 so far in 2026. Given the rate of annual increase, baseball could be on track to reach the 30,000 mark again for the first time since 2016. A whole or partial missed season would be, it’s safe to say, a setback.
Lost: Great playoff races
The 1994 season was the first one after baseball switched to the six-division format and expanded the playoff field to include a wild-card team in each league. Purists had decried this; it was against baseball dogma to put a non-first-place team in the playoffs. Plus epic winner-take-all pennant/division races, like we saw the season before between the 104-win Braves and 103-win Giants, would be a thing of the past.
No one really knew how it would turn out, but that first season was looking pretty dramatic.
The month before I made the move to Chicago, I drove over from Columbia, Missouri, to Kansas City to take in a game between the Royals and White Sox. It was the first season of the post-George Brett years, but the Royals seemed poised to spin things forward into a new era of success.
In that game, on July 25, or three weeks before the strike, I was one of 32,459 fans at Kauffman Stadium who saw the Royals and White Sox engage in a terse battle that reached the 12th inning, when Chicago plated a run to go ahead. In came revered closer Roberto Hernandez, and things seemed dire, especially when Brian McRae popped up a bunt to begin the bottom of the 12th.
But then Dave Henderson and Wally Joyner singled, bringing up “The Hammer.” He’s little remembered outside of Kansas City today, but Bob Hamelin was an emergent folk hero in Kansas City in 1994 who wound up winning AL Rookie of the Year honors. He launched the first pitch he saw from Hernandez over the right-field fence, sending the crowd into a frenzy. I can still feel the goosebumps.
That turned out to be the third win in what became a 13-game winning streak that put the Royals in a three-team race for the first AL Central title with Cleveland and Chicago. When the strike began, the Royals were four back of the White Sox in the division and three back of the Indians in the wild-card chase. That ended all at once, with the Royals finishing 64-51.
Kansas City did not enjoy another winning season until 2003 and didn’t return to the playoffs until 2014. After the strike, the Royals unloaded McRae, reigning Cy Young winner David Cone and others. When you read about the postseason races lost in 1994, you never see anything about the Royals. But fans of teams in every division could share similar tales of heartbreak and woe. That’s what the 1994 strike left us with.
What if we lose 2027? We don’t know what next season’s races will look like, but every season has great races and they are the lifeblood of baseball. If they pulled the plug on the 2026 season right now, for example, we’d never know who was left at the end of the season out of the 18 clubs currently with at least a 10% chance at the playoffs. Would the Dodgers pull off a three-peat? Would either the Brewers or Rays, the current top seeds, land their first championships?
Lost: Kenny Lofton’s MVP push
Postseason awards were handed out over the winter despite the 1994 season’s cancellation. Frank Thomas was named the AL’s MVP. He was the right pick, given where things stood on Aug. 12, as he was hitting an amazing .353/.487/.729 with 38 homers, 101 RBIs and 6.4 bWAR. This last thing -- WAR -- wasn’t around in a mainstream sense then, but we can now see that Lofton actually led the AL with 7.2 bWAR that season.
The thing that made 1994 so special was that there was no one type of historic performance that defined it. You had Maddux putting Christy Mathewson numbers on the pitching side, you had the epic power seasons of Williams, Griffey and the rest, you had Gwynn chasing down .400 and you had Lofton, offering the speed game. Lofton hit .349 that season and was on pace for 148 runs and 85 stolen bases when the strike began. Thomas won the MVP vote, but it wasn’t unanimous and Lofton did earn a first-place vote.
After a huge first half, Lofton had tailed off after the break, so maybe he wouldn’t have run down Thomas, Griffey or Belle, who all outpointed him at balloting time. But it’s not out of the question that he might have gotten there with a big finish, especially as Cleveland might have been closing in on its first postseason berth since it lost the 1954 World Series.
For Lofton, this missing résumé item might have cost him a place in Cooperstown. (For now anyway. I am steadfast that Lofton belongs and will eventually get in.) Instead, he fell off the ballot after not receiving enough support in his first year of eligibility. Would that have happened had he won that MVP? Seems all but certain he would have at least remained on the ballot so that his case could build momentum.
What if we lose 2027? I’m not sure there is a great example here, as it’s the kind of thing that really only comes clear well after the fact. But how about somebody like Kyle Schwarber? He’s another player whose chase of 500 homers could be kneecapped by a missed season. Schwarber is probably outside of the Hall conversation, but he continues to put up huge homer numbers at age 33 and arguably is as good as he has ever been. He finished second in MVP voting last year and if he were to win that award, that would really raise his historical profile. But this run of big-homer seasons won’t last forever.
Lost: Michael Jordan’s big league spring training
The story has been told many times, usually in documentary form. Jordan was planning to continue his baseball career and attend White Sox spring training in 1995 as a non-roster invitee. Instead, replacement players emerged and Jordan peaced-out, ending up back in the NBA where he went on to lead the Bulls to a second three-peat.
The what-ifs here are more on the basketball side than baseball, because I don’t think Jordan would have ever enjoyed more than a courtesy appearance in the majors had he kept playing baseball. But maybe there’s other fallout, because since he wasn’t playing baseball in 1995, that summer he was shooting “Space Jam.”
Did basketball movies usurp baseball movies because of that? After all, in 1994, besides the Burns documentary, “Major League II,” “Little Big League,” “Angels in the Outfield,” “Cobb” and “The Scout” were released. Baseball, then, was good box office business. On the basketball side, what would have become of Shawn Bradley’s acting career?
Lost: The Don Mattingly World Series
Speaking of possible Hall of Fame boosters, the Yankees owned the AL’s best record when the strike began. It was the renaissance of the New York dynasty, until it wasn’t, because the season ended like a popped balloon. The Yankees had not been in the postseason since 1981, but were 6½ games up on Baltimore in the AL East on Aug. 12.
Mattingly did not participate in the postseason until the next season, his last, in 1995. He did not participate in a World Series until last fall, when he made it there as the bench coach for the Toronto Blue Jays. Obviously the playoff format in 1994 would have presented an obstacle, especially as there were a lot of strong teams in the AL that season.
Still, at the moment of the strike, the Yankees were the AL’s top team, Donnie Baseball was hitting over .300, and after the season he collected another Gold Glove. He was, we know now, almost out of chances to make the Fall Classic as a player. And if he had, and if he had starred while doing so, would he now be in the Hall of Fame?
What if we lose 2027? Trout stands out here. Obviously the Angels are a long way from World Series contention. But things can turn fast with the right leadership. Look at what’s happened with the White Sox, though that didn’t come together in one year. Still, hang with me. What if a dynamic new exec takes the helm in Anaheim and reshuffles the Angels with the expressed hope of giving Trout another shot at the playoffs? But what if that scenario can never play out because no one is sure there will even be a 2027 season to shoot for? At the very least, we can recognize that Trout only has so many more seasons to play with.
Lost: The Montreal Expos
This is the saddest cut of them all, and the most famous bit of fallout from the 1994 labor strife. The Expos were the best team in baseball when the strike began. They led the Braves by six games in the NL East, but in the end, there were no division title winners in 1994. That’s why the Braves can now claim to have won 14 straight division crowns during that era.
Montreal was 74-40, on pace for 105 wins and was playing its best baseball when the curtain came down. The Expos had won 20 of their last 23 when the season prematurely ended. No, they would not have been shoo-ins to beat Atlanta or Cincinnati or Houston in a playoff series, but they would have been favored.
The Expos were the NL’s youngest team on both the hitting and pitching sides in 1994. Imagine that young team, led by Larry Walker, Moises Alou, Marquis Grissom and Pedro Martinez, remaining together through their primes. In 1994, Montreal averaged nearly 28,000 fans per game and momentum was building. The roster was broken up before the 1995 season, and that attendance number dove to 7,935 by 2001.
With the loss of the 1994 season, the Montreal Expos were effectively killed off, though the relocation to Washington was still a decade away. The version of the Expos on Opening Day in 1995 was a mere shell of the team it had been the year before and it only got worse from there.
If the 1994 season had not halted, then maybe the Expos win it all, maybe the fanbase explodes, a new stadium is built and you could watch them play tonight. That’s not great news for fans in Washington, but who knows what would have happened there.
What if we lose 2027? Let’s hope there isn’t a contemporary equivalent, but how about the Rays? The fanbase there is outstanding, but it has never paid off that well in terms of attendance because of the longstanding need for a better, and better-located, playing venue. Such a venue is in the works now, though this saga has been going on longer than “The Odyssey,” so we have to maintain a we’ll-believe-it-when-we-see-it attitude. Would a lockout that wiped out the season kill the project? Would the Rays stick around if that happened?
In the end, the list of we’ll-never-knows about 1994 add up to what should have been an epic season, another chapter in baseball’s never-ending novel, perhaps its best one. Instead, it resolved as unrequited anticipation of across-the-board glories that can never be realized. If the “Baseball” documentary series really did feel like a eulogy at the time, perhaps in a way it was, because what was lost can never be regained.
Those on both sides of the labor aisle from that time will tell you that, as painful as it was, it was largely worth it in the end. The main thing they cite is the ongoing period of relative labor peace that baseball has enjoyed since, if we define “peace” as playing actual games with actual players. But if these rancorous negotiations continue to go south, with claims and demands that very much echo those of 32 years ago, then ’94 strike defenders won’t even have that mark in their favor.
Baseball lost fans then, some forever, and the quest to fully reclaim its tenuous hold on the public remains ongoing. Over the past few years, that quest feels like it has been going pretty well. If you were around for the sudden snuffing of the 1994 season, you know things have never really been quite the same, and you know better than to take anything -- even a World Series -- for granted. Let’s hope those doing the negotiating at least take that much to heart.
