When we think about baseball labor, everyone instantly goes to 1994 to point fingers. But how did we get there? As we laid out in the 80s episode, distrust between owners and players was bubbling over especially with collusion cases coming to light.

Donald Fehr would be running the show now, Marvin Miller and Curt Flood watching from the sidelines but offering support when needed. On the ownership side, in-fighting led to forcing a commissioner to resign and install one of their own to run the boyhood game: Allan H. "Bud" Selig.

1994 deserves plenty of conversation, and we are far from the only ones who have talked about the strike and its impact on the sport. But this episode really focuses on the before and after of 1994. What if replacement players were actually installed? Could revenue sharing really work between large market and small market teams? How do you get player's salaries back down despite record revenues pouring into the league?

There are only three more episodes planned for the Service Time Podcast, and we hope you enjoy this episode as we enter the high leverage innings of our show.

As always, you can find the articles and stories we mentioned in the episode over on our Substack page, servicetimepodcast.substack.com. You can an also upgrade to a paid subscription to support the program with ad-free listening in the substack app.

Or you can subscribe for free and be notified via email when a new episode drops. Thanks for listening, next month we retrace the missteps by the league and the PA when it comes to steroids and the fallout from the Mitchell Report. The New Millennium arrives in October.

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Marvin Miller found himself pleasantly surprised by also worried. The ultimate goal of abolishing the Reserve Clause had tumbled in just ten years since he took the reins of the MLBPA. Free agency was a dream that suddenly brought new problems no one could have been prepared for.

The battle over free agent compensation burned hot and cold for years, but reached a flash point in the 1980 negotiations, leading to the longest stoppage in baseball history ... to date.

The owners continued to lose control of the players while their pockets were lined with a booming business, but the going price to keep quality players was getting more expensive. New owners embraced free agency, the old guard had to find ways to "get theirs" whether it was through roster shuffling ... or colluding to keep salaries down.

As always, you can find the articles and stories we mentioned in the episode over on our Substack page, servicetimepodcast.substack.com. You can an also upgrade to a paid subscription to support the program with ad-free listening in the substack app.

Or you can subscribe for free and be notified via email when a new episode drops. Thanks for listening, next month we reach the most destructive year of baseball's history and how they rebuilt from the 1994 strike.

Connect with the show: ServiceTimePod@Gmail.com

There are many names to remember across baseball's history, but a handful tend to stick around longer than you realize. Sometimes the names adorn stadiums that stood for decades, or television channels bringing their teams to the masses, or their names can live in infamy depending on the city that you ask.

Episode 3 focuses on nine owners we picked that fit this description. The owners we discuss are (in order)

Connie Mack, Charles Comiskey, Philip Wrigley Jr., Branch Rickey/Walter O'Malley, Bill Veeck Jr., Charlie Finley, Ted Turner, George Steinbrenner.

We wanted to focus on how these men rose to power, and how they maintained their image and legacy during their time as owners - and their impact on labor negotiations to this day. There's only so much we can dissect from each owner, but a few of these owners will keep popping up throughout the rest of the series.

Connect with the show: ServiceTimePod@Gmail.com

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