June 12, 1981: The Strike of '81 Begins

June 12, 1981: The Major League Baseball Players Association goes on strike. They had done so before, in 1972, leading to the cancellation of, depending on the team, 6 to 9 games. This time, there would be more.

Marvin Miller, Director of the Players' Association since 1966, announced that negotiations with Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and the 26 team owners had failed: "We have accomplished nothing. The strike is on."

The owners, angry that free agency had been ordered at all in 1975, demanded compensation: A player signed as a free agent by a team should mean that the signing team should give a player not on a protected list to the team losing the preceding player. The MLBPA said no, because that would undermine the value of free agency.

Marvin Miller

So the strike was on. A Summer without baseball might have been the worst thing that could have happened to me, age 11. I was more worried during the Strike of '81 that baseball as I knew it would never return than I was during the Strike of '94, which was both longer and nastier.

On July 31, the players and the owners reached a compromise, negotiated in part by Raymond J. Donovan, Secretary of Labor under President Ronald Reagan. Teams that lost a "premium" free agent could be compensated by drawing from a pool of players left unprotected from all of the clubs, rather than just the signing club. The players agreed to restricting free agency to players with 6 or more years of major league service, instead of the previous 5.

It was a minor victory for the owners, and there would be strikes again in 1985 and 1994. But baseball would resume, with the All-Star Game, originally scheduled for Cleveland Municipal Stadium on Tuesday night, July 14, moved to Sunday night, August 9, with the National League winning, 5-4. Regular-season games restarted the next day.

Since every MLB team stopped on June 12, and no other sports were running at the time -- the NBA season ended on May 14, and the NHL season on May 21, and the NFL season didn't start until September 6 -- there were no scores on that historic day.

But there was a major sporting event: Larry Holmes successfully defended the Heavyweight Championship of the World, defeating former Champion Leon Spinks, by a technical knockout in the 3rd round, at a venue named for another former Champion, the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit.

This was also the day that the film Raiders of the Lost Ark premiered. I have a separate entry for that.

And Brazilian supermodel Adriana Lima was born.