The Year Without a World Series

Hitting a baseball is often regarded as the most difficult task in sport. Writing baseball history is a similarly difficult task. The skill involved in each challenge is considerable, yet it is the romanticized narratives of baseball—especially how they are so often mythologized in relation to the sport's larger meanings for American culture—that add a particularly daunting veneer to each. The difficulty is itself part of the mythology in that the very fact of rare success in the face of such daunting prospects is meant to be a metaphor for the triumphant American spirit. Yet failure and setbacks are often found along the way. Robert C. Cottrell, emeritus professor of history and American studies at California State University, Chico, chronicles such a moment in The Year Without a World Series. Providing a detailed narrative of the 1994 Major League Baseball players’ strike, Cottrell describes this event in the context of the century-long story of player attempts at unionization, team owner machinations attempting (and ultimately failing) to retain iron-fisted control over labor, and the varying factors that led to a strike-shortened season.There is no shortage of lamenting the unanswerable “what if” questions. Cottrell often focuses on individual achievements and statistical records that were on pace to be surpassed had the season continued, as well as the playoff chase that was building toward a climax that never resolved—an unfinished ending embodied by the World Series that never was. The latter third of The Year Without a World Series is dedicated to a month-by-month accounting of top performers and pennant chases in each league. Cottrell gleefully combs box scores and sports columns to build season-compelling storylines knowing that this will come to an unsatisfying halt. Certainly, fans were deprived of the outcomes that a complete 1994 season would have provided. However, the claim—so often repeated by sportswriters and commentors whom Cottrell liberally quotes without further analysis—that these outcomes and the World Series itself hold such cultural significance that business interests ought to be set aside for some mythical greater good stretches logical limits.Other aspects of this story beg for greater historical analysis, though Cotrell seems content to simply let actors from different perspectives have their say without much commentary. The most glaring example is the pair of chapters about the game's two biggest stars—Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr., both sons of former star players. These chapters ostensibly aim to highlight their exceptional skill and to set up the potential for historic seasons that neither would complete due to the strike-shortened season. Yet each chapter is also infused with the contemporary criticisms of their character that each faced. Bonds is often described as a haughty, arrogant, and unapproachably surly superstar. He is viewed as the archetype for the self-centered millionaire, willing to put outspoken self-interest ahead of the “good of the game.” Griffey, whose chapter is titled “The Natural,” is described by contemporaries as so athletically gifted as to have no need for hard work or inclination toward consistent effort and hustle. His nicknames “Kid” or “Junior” infantilized him. His joyous demeanor and relaxed backwards-hat style, many people thought, suggested that he was not “respecting the game” or playing the “right” way. Yes, both players were successful in the face of these criticisms; yet taken together, the tropes attributed to each player also plainly represent the most common stereotypes associated with Black male athletes, a fact that Cottrell does not mention.The team owners’ greed is deeply criticized from all contemporary angles as well, though at times with eyebrow-raising language that goes unexamined. One quote in particular calls the cancellation of the remaining games and the postseason “one of the great public miscalculations ever committed in this part of the world. They baseball team owners will be forever redefining a sport, a business, a way of life, a national pastime, as it used to be called but can never be again. . . . Now they are preparing to cheapen that heritage by closing it down for this season, for the foreseeable future” (203). The quote blares with hyperbole about baseball's special place in American culture, but it also implies that greed in business is somehow foreign to cultural institutions in America. Worse, in what could easily be interpreted as thinly veiled anti-Semitism, the collective greed that cheapens the national heritage is attributed in the next line to two prominent Jewish team owners, their names invoked as plurals, with the quoted sportswriter declaring, “They must live with the consequences, these Reinsdorfs and Seligs” (203).Cottrell smartly describes the conservative sentiment that characterized baseball as an industry and institution throughout the early chapters. Even the unionization efforts and player activism dating to the nineteenth century, continuing through the first half of the twentieth century and vestigially perceptible in the decades leading to the 1994 strike, were consciously attuned to popular sentiment and careful to avoid perceptions of so-called radical politics. It is clear that the main issues—control over labor rights and minimizing salaries—were constant throughout the decades and remain central to the World Series cancellation. Yet the romanticization of baseball as somehow being above the fray of either capitalistic greed or rights-based activism is pervasive in commentary from players, management, government, and the press throughout the narrative. These rose-colored glasses, through which teams are seen chasing glory and players seeking baseball “immortality,” create analytical blind spots and prevent Cottrell from more fully connecting the dots across the broader narrative of social and business significance.Such is the challenge writing about baseball. Cottrell nevertheless covers a lot of ground, and this chronicle is a useful primer on labor relations in baseball leading to the 1994 strike. Cottrell takes a big swing at a difficult topic and provides a solid contribution to our understanding of the sport in this era.