August 9, 1981: The Strike of '81 Ends

One exasperated reader wrote to SI with this killjoy question:

"'A big hand for baseball'? Whatever the hell for?"

August 9, 1981: The Major League Baseball strike comes to a symbolic end with the staging of the All-Star Game at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

On June 12, 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, and the middle one-third of the 1981 season's regular-season games were canceled. 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, and lockouts in 1990 and the 2021-22 off-season. But, this time, baseball would resume, with the All-Star Game, originally scheduled for Cleveland on Tuesday night, July 14, moved to Sunday night, August 9, with regular-season games starting the next day.

The crowd of 72,086 was, and remains, an All-Star Game record. With his spectacular start to the season, Fernando Valenzuela of the Los Angeles Dodgers was a natural selection for the National League's starting pitcher. Jack Morris of the Detroit Tigers was chosen for the American League.

New York Yankees on the AL All-Star Team were Reggie Jackson, Willie Randolph, Bucky Dent, Ron Davis, Goose Gossage, and free agent bonanza Dave Winfield. The only New York Met selected for the NL All-Star Team was outfielder Joel Youngblood, although Randolph, Tom Seaver of the Cincinnati Reds, Nolan Ryan of the Houston Astros, Eddie Murray and Ken Singleton of the Baltimore Orioles, Gary Carter of the Montreal Expos, and George Foster of the Cincinnati Reds were selected, and each of those would play for the Mets at some point in their careers.

Singleton hit a home run off Seaver in the bottom of the 2nd, but Carter homered in the 5th, and Dave Parker of the Pittsburgh Pirates did so in the 6th to give the NL the lead. The AL took a 4-2 lead in the bottom of the 6th, but Carter went deep again in the 7th, this time off Davis. And Mike Schmidt of the Philadelphia Phillies homered off Rollie Fingers of the Milwaukee Brewers in the 8th, to give the NL a 5-4 win. Vida Blue, then with the San Francisco Giants, was the winning pitcher. Bruce Sutter of the St. Louis Cardinals got the save, and Fingers was the losing pitcher.

There was one other score on this historic day, in the Canadian Football League: The Vancouver-based B.C. Lions beat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, 28-24 at Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton, Ontario.