On September 14th, the remainder of the baseball season was canceled thirty-four days into the players' strike. Part of the Baseball Almanac Family. Gwynn was hitting .394 when the strike happened and had been at .400 as recently as May. Let’s start with the regular season. Visit ESPN to view the 2020 MLB Standings. East Division W L PCT GB L10 STRK Home Away; Tampa Bay Rays - x: Rays - x: 36: 19.655-7 … Although Houston is in the AL today, it was a member of the National League in 1994.
Here is what OOTP’s simulations think the standings — which newly included a wild-card playoff slot for teams that didn’t win their divisions — would have looked like if the season was allowed to play out normally: Hypothetical 1994 Major League Baseball standings based on 1,000 simulations run by Out Of The Park from Aug. 12 (when the players strike began) through the end of the regular season. This was an important capitulation by then-MLBPA head Don Fehr because it was something his pioneering predecessor, Marvin Miller, would never have abided. U.S. national champion figure skater Nancy Kerrigan, a 1992 Olympic bronze medalist and one of the favorites to win the gold medal, was attacked after a practice at the U.S. Olympic trials. (He was also heating up right before the strike, hitting .475 in the first 11 days of August. MLB 1994 strike anniversary: Montreal Expos’ greatest season vanished overnight Montreal Expos manager Felipe Alou speaks with his son, Expos outfielder Moises Alou, during spring training in 1996. Considered by some to be among history's greatest athletes, Michael Jordan suited up for the Birmingham Barons, the Class AA affiliate of the Chicago White Sox.
No postseason (including the World Series) was played. A year after Joe Carter won the 1993 World Series for another Canadian team with a walk-off home run, Walker crushed Wickman’s pitch over the wall in right for a title-clinching blast of his own.
Minor League Baseball was not affected by the strike. Because it’s possible that more than one of these performances could happen in the same season, there was about a 27 percent chance that somebody would have at least tied Maris’s record in 1994 and an 18 percent chance the record would have been outright broken. And somebody had to win the abysmal four-team AL West, although OOTP thinks the winner — whether it was Oakland or Texas, or maybe even someone else — would very likely have carried a below-.500 record, probably joining the 1981 Royals as the only team in baseball history to make the postseason with a losing regular-season mark. Kevin Appier, of the Kansas City Royals, set an all-time record (traced back to 1986) after striking out thirteen Texas Rangers in only five and 2/3 innings of work. Indeed, the owners didn't even make a formal proposal to the players until 18 months after they re-opened negotiations. As for the NL, the Expos would almost certainly have made the playoffs, probably as East champs over the defending West champion Braves, who’d been realigned into a more proper geographic bucket when the third division was added. In the American League, the playoff field would very likely have included the Yankees out of the East — thus snapping a 12-season drought for the Bronx Bombers — plus the White Sox (who had lost the League Championship Series the previous year) and the Indians from the brand-new Central division. Win Expectancy, Run Expectancy, and Leverage Index calculations provided by Tom Tango of InsideTheBook.com, and co-author of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. 2020 team records, home and away … @Neil_Paine, MLB (597 posts) Twenty years hence, though, who should we blame for what happened to baseball in the summer of '94? The team has won five postseason games since then, not two. CBS Sports is a registered trademark of CBS Broadcasting Inc. Commissioner.com is a registered trademark of CBS Interactive Inc. site: media | arena: mlb | pageType: stories | Conference Playoffs. Since '94, we've had a long run of labor peace after enduring eight labor stoppages between 1972 and 1994. The former is a topic for another forum, and the latter is just envy dressed up in populism. No union worth its name would accept this kind of retrograde system absent genuine crisis. 7:57 am ET, salary caps do nothing to promote competitive balance, some of the proposed changes they finally conjured up, the collusion scandal less than 10 years prior.