Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

MLB

How Judge Sonia Sotomayor saved MLB from Scab Ball folly

There was a genuine tension inside Room 110 of the Federal Courthouse at 40 Centre Street that Friday morning, 25 years ago, March 31, 1995. The bloodied sport of baseball had gathered in that room, all its warring parties secured between four walls. They had already jointly committed 233 days of carnage to the game’s health.

Inside this same room, a quarter century before, baseball’s owners had won a battle against Curt Flood, who’d sued the sport over the reserve clause, a standard contract stipulation that for a century had bound players to their original teams perpetually. Baseball won that round. It was a pyrrhic victory.

Over the next 25 years, baseball’s owners absorbed beating after beating from the MLB Players Association. But now, for the first time, it seemed the MLBPA was vulnerable. Owners had brought replacement players to spring training. They threatened to play 1995 on the backs of those scabs.

There was talk the baseball union, with a history of absolute loyalty to its cause, was on the verge of fracturing, talk of players breaking down like NFL players had in 1987 and crossing picket lines in waves. Donald Fehr, head of the MLBPA, walked into Room 110, having played his last card, seeking an injunction for unfair labor practices.

U.S. District Judge Sonia Sotomayor listened to arguments for one hour.

MLB
Judge Sonia Sotomayor at a Yankees game in 2019.Paul J. Bereswill

Then she issued her ruling:

Injunction granted. The strike was over. Fourteen years later, after nominating Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and listing her many accomplishments, President Barack Obama added this:

“Some say that Judge Sotomayor saved baseball.”


That particular point has long been subject for debate, but one thing is certain: Justice Sonia Sotomayor saved baseball from further covering itself in a clown suit, from spattering more mud on itself, from bringing further humiliation on the game.

(Reached via email through the Supreme Court’s public information office, Justice Sotomayor declined to talk about her ’95 ruling, given the current climate.)

The strike itself, launched at midnight on Aug. 12, 1994 — ironically, the anniversary of the Flood decision — had already brought calamity to the game. It ended a season chockablock with irresistible stories: The Montreal Expos were the best team in the sport at 74-40; the Yankees were 70-43 and 6 ½ games up in an A.L. East they hadn’t won in 13 years.

Tony Gwynn was hitting .394 and had hit .423 in the 28 games since the All-Star break; he had Ted Williams in his sights. Matt Williams, with 43 homers, was a few games ahead of Roger Maris’ pace.

Worse, the bitterness on both sides knew no bounds as fans wondered whether to side with millionaire ballplayers or billionaire owners. As baseball tumbled into a vacuum, a small but stubborn faction of fans swore off the game forever.

And even this was prelude for the folly that was scab baseball, which filled spring-training facilities all over Florida and Arizona in February and March of 1995. The most notable Yankee was 275-pound first baseman Matt Stark, presumptive scab-heir to Don Mattingly, who early in spring training was holding court with reporters when his chair splintered.

The Yankees actually had to conduct a team meeting to alert their replacement players that it was inappropriate to wear their Yankees gear — hats, jackets, a few jerseys — when they strolled through malls or went to restaurants.

None of New York’s baseball lifers were happy. Yankees GM Gene Michael, whose sad task was to assemble a roster of teachers and salesmen and construction workers and pass them off as the “New York Yankees” spent most of spring in a disconsolate haze.

“Some of these players, I’ve never seen,” Michael conceded late in the spring. “To give you an evaluation, I wouldn’t do that.”

The day the Fake Yankees played an exhibition game in Denver to open Coors Field, Michael, back in Fort Lauderdale, was pulled over for DUI. In apologizing, he admitted the bad comedy of scab baseball had finally gotten to him.

With the Mets, Dallas Green did little to hide the contempt he felt for the scabs littering his camp and he rode them mercilessly in the heat: lots of running, lots of drills, and by early March, Port St. Lucie resembled the scene of Bear Bryant’s famous “Junction Boys” football camp, players fleeing in the night to escape Green’s Draconian rule.

Dallas Green
Dallas GreenBob Olen

Green scoffed at the gall of it all.

“I don’t think too many managers or coaches you talk to in baseball are real thrilled about doing what the hell we’re doing,” he said.

And the slapstick wasn’t even the worst part. Detroit manager Sparky Anderson simply walked out of Tigers camp one morning, unable to stomach even another minute of Scab Ball. The Orioles, owned by a labor attorney, Peter Angelos, closed camp in mid-March, and a Baltimore court backed them up, banning replacement games at Camden Yards.

(Angelos was at least in part motivated by the fact that if scabs played even one game of real baseball, their stats would count as part of baseball’s permanent history, and that would bring the worst possible ending to Cal Ripken’s consecutive-game streak, which stood at 2,009, just 121 shy of Lou Gehrig’s record.)

Canadian labor laws similarly forbade scabs from playing in Toronto’s SkyDome, so the Blue Jays would have to play their home games at their spring complex in Dunedin, Fla.

That was the mess baseball found itself in.

That was the mess Justice Sotomayor saved baseball from on March 31, 1995.


The fallout was quick. The Fake Yankees played that final exhibition in Denver. The Fake Mets played one in Cleveland. Then, instead of zooming off to the regular season, the team planes headed back to Florida, the players were given the $5,000 checks they were promised to sign on for the folly. Some were invited to play minor league ball. Some — notably Kevin Millar and Rick Reed — had notable careers as big-leaguers.

The rest were scattered like ashes, embers of a game that had spent 233 days in self-immolation.

Baseball’s issues wouldn’t be resolved for another two years until the next collective bargaining agreement was finally signed. There was some percolating anger in the months after baseball came back to life, but it has mostly motored on in unprecedented prosperity.

Right up until two weeks ago, when it vanished again, first time in 25 years, under very different circumstances. No judge will end the silence this time. Patience alone will have to carry the day.