April 2: End of the Baseball Strike

Major League Baseball’s players union ended a 232-day strike that had cancelled much of the 1994 season on this date in 1995. While a progressive Jew, Marvin Miller, had turned the players’ union into a dynamic labor organization before his retirement in 1982, Jews were working the other side of the table during the 1994-95 strike. “The Union basically doesn’t trust the Ownership,” said baseball Commission Fay Vincent, who was forced to resign by the team owners in the course of the strike, “because . . . Bud Selig and Jerry Reinsdorf [were responsible for] a $280 million theft . . . from the players. I mean, they rigged the signing of free agents. They got caught. They paid $280 million to the players. And I think that’s polluted labor relations in baseball ever since it happened.” Selig, who became Commissioner, owned the Milwaukee Brewers; Reinsdorf owned the Chicago White Sox. They and the other owners were represented by Richard Ravitch. The owners were prepared to hire scab ballplayers at the start of the 1995 season, but future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a preliminary injunction against them on March 31. Her decision was sustained by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which said that the owners had illegally attempted to eliminate free agency and salary arbitration.

“They’re trying to roll back 25 years of labor agreements in one round.” —Fay Vincent