Baseball's Big Strike
by Andy Behrens

Let's begin with a quick labor-strife- in-Major- League-Baseball trivia question, shall we? Everyone likes those.

OK, which of the following happened as a result of the 1981 players' strike?

A) Owners won a critical concession from the players union, receiving compensatory picks for players lost to free agency;

B) Vida Blue had both motive and opportunity to inhale a loaf of cocaine every day for two months;

C) The Cincinnati Reds finished with a better full-season record than any team in the league, yet they didn't make the playoffs because baseball awarded half-season division titles;

D) Definitely A and C, and very likely B.

Whatever else the 1981 baseball strike did, it had another unintended consequence, too. It's kept several of the era's best players out of the Hall of Fame, a tradition that continues with the 2007 Hall class.

That might seem like a shaky proposition since we're supposed to blame performance enhancers for any inequities in baseball. In fact, one of the more well-developed sub-areas of our collective steroid indignation is this: the gaudy statistics compiled by 'roid-era sluggers — guys like Bonds, Palmeiro, Sosa and McGwire — so thoroughly dwarf the career numbers of those clean-living stars of the 1970s and '80s that, for better or worse, many deserving players will never make it to the Hall. Alas, poor Dale Murphy, or words to that effect.

Well, that's crap. Because Murphy — like Jim Rice, Andre Dawson and Bert Blyleven — stopped playing baseball for nearly two months in support of a strike that lopped more than 700 games from the schedule. The Atlanta Braves, Murphy's team, played only 106 games in the abbreviated season, which probably cost the 1982 and 1983 National League MVP something like 220 at-bats in 1981. He retired with 398 career home runs, two short of a milestone number that, had he reached it, would almost surely make his Hall of Fame candidacy more credible in the eyes of the 90.8 percent of baseball writers who didn't have him on their 2007 ballots.

Murphy is hardly alone among the stars of his era who narrowly missed 400 dingers, either. Graig Nettles finished his career with 390, Dwight Evans with 385, Harold Baines — who also participated in the work stoppage of 1994 — with 384, and Rice with 382. Baines also retired 134 hits shy of 3000. Dawson fell 226 hits short.

Bert Blyleven, who had the misfortune of pitching for a remarkable number of perfectly mediocre teams, ended his career with 287 wins. Obviously he still wouldn't have made it to 300 even if the 1981 Cleveland Indians (52-51) had played another 59 games. But he probably would've reached 290; he did manage 11 wins and a 2.88 ERA in 1981. And if Blyleven had finished his career with 290 wins, would that strengthen his candidacy just enough? Maybe. His name appeared on 53.3 percent of ballots cast in the 2006 election, and 47.7 percent this year. Enshrinement requires 75 percent.

So should we feel sympathetic toward the generation of players that lost precious games and stats to union posturing? Should we — or the baseball writers, or the veterans committee, or whoever else — welcome to the Hall those stars who surely would have reached all the right career milestones if player/owner enmity hadn't interfered?

Hell, no. That year sucked. Air Supply, who had more hits in 1981 than Fernando Valenzuela had wins, had it this way (in a song that quite possibly wasn't about baseball, but let's just fake it): "I want you to come back and carry me home/ Away from these long lonely nights/ I'm reaching for you, are you feeling it too?"

But the players' union didn't feel it. At all. The feathery haired cud-chewers struck, and their career numbers suffered. The issues that led to the strike were so arcane and the negotiations so contentious that nearly all of us developed a visceral dislike for the parties involved. And if the most obvious legacy of that strike is that disproportionately few of the era's stars make the Hall of Fame, fine. Let's just be sure not to blame the Cansecos or Barry or Mark Sweeney's secret stash or any of the other usual baseball villains when we lament future vote totals.

E-mail Andy Behrens at abehrens53 at hotmail dot com.