FORGOTTEN CHAMPS
’94 strike ruined AL pennant
T HEY will never have an Old-Timer’s Day set aside for them. There are times it seems the season they had and all the games they won didn’t happen in real life, but in a movie, some direct-tovideo sequel of “Major League.”
But for those who remember the 1994 Yankees, Saturday was a seminal anniversary.
Because on Aug. 3, 1994, the Yankees defeated Brewers (then of the AL Central), 2-1 in a rain-shortened game at old County Stadium. Sterling Hitchcock threw seven innings of fivehit ball. Jim Leyritz and Randy Velarde hit solo homers. Don Mattingly went 1-for-3, lifting his average to .310.
And all the newspaper stories the next day carried the same theme:
THE YANKEES CLINCHED THE PENNANT*
The asterisk, of course, was the relevant part — and also the most devastating part. Because baseball was the secondary conversation in baseball that August 25 years ago. The win lifted the Yankees’ lead to nine games with only nine days (and eight games) before Aug. 12, which is when baseball’s players had called a strike date.
If, as expected, the players struck, they were guaranteed to be in first place.
If, as was also expected, the strike was long (which it was) and canceled out the rest of the regular season (which it did), but also was resolved before baseball did the unthinkable and canceled the postseason, it would have guaranteed the Yankees’ first appearance in October in 13 unbearably long years.
That last part was the trick, of course. Baseball did cancel the playoffs, and did stay on strike until the following spring, and nearly implemented a dreadful replacement-player scheme before future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor intervened. There were no playoffs for the 1994 Yankees, no crack at a 23rd world championship.
What happened in the immediate aftermath, of course, made that easier for Yankees fans to tolerate than, say, fans of the Expos, who wound up 74-40 and were the true what-if team of that year. Baseball never recovered in Montreal, that team was broken up and now plays in Washington.
The Yankees were 70-43. In two years they really did win No. 23, then added three more shortly thereafter and another in 2009. They have a fine chance at getting to No. 28 this year. It is easy to forget that 1994 even happened.
But it did. And when it did, it announced a signal change not only in the city (where the Mets had ruled, almost unchallenged, from 1984-92) but in the sport. The Yankees were thought to be a relic only a few years earlier, lost and losing, the good times gone, possibly forever. That season — 1994 — changed that.
The Yankees started 26-10 and by Aug. 4, they had a 10-game lead. They were good on both sides of the ball and the mammoth crowds that defined old Yankee Stadium’s final years had started to return. And then it was gone. They are, technically and forever, the ’94 AL East champs. That was secured 25 years ago this weekend.
“I don’t look at it as a celebratory situation at all,” Buck Showalter said in Milwaukee that day, after saying they would celebrate with cans of Bud Lite, not champagne. “We’ve hoped all along to play a 162-game schedule and that’s what we still hope.”
Ah, well.