A few months ago, it would have been impossible to imagine what’s happening in baseball right now. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak that was officially recognized as a global pandemic last week, the 2020 MLB season has been delayed indefinitely. There’s simply no precedent for what’s happening.
That said, there is precedent for extended, unwelcome interruptions to the baseball season. More than a century ago, the 1919 season was shortened as players made their way back from the First World War. Decades later, labour stoppages interrupted numerous seasons and even led to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.
With those examples in mind, I reached out to John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, for some help putting the league’s current pause into historical context. His answers shed light on past stoppages and provided some perspective for the year ahead…
Ben Nicholson-Smith: While we can typically count on games every night, this isn’t the first time the baseball calendar has been disrupted. In the past, when work stoppages have impacted the schedule, how did players stay in shape for the season? How long did they need once spring training began?
John Thorn: MLB prepared to start the 1995 season with replacement players, who filled spring training camps until peace broke out on April 3, just as the regular season was about to commence. The replacements were sent packing, and the long-idle regulars began their own training period of about three weeks. (The 1995 season, truncated to 144 games, opened on April 25.) While today’s players may be expected to stay in shape as the current baseball hiatus continues – in a way that the players of 1994-95 surely did not – one might expect that a training period of a week or two, especially for pitchers, would be needed before opening day.
BNS: For fans, this would typically be a time of excitement with opening day around the corner. When work stoppages have happened throughout history, how did fans stay engaged with the game?
Thorn: Lockouts or strikes delayed opening day in 1972 and 1990, too, leading to grumbling by fans but not the wholesale disengagement that marked the period after 1995, when MLB attendance on a per-club basis declined, a fact papered over by the expansion of 1998 (MLB attendance did not return to 1993 levels for a decade). When play resumes in 2020, fans can blame neither labour nor management, and thus may be expected to resume their engagement with the game, even if at the outset they may have health-related concerns about returning to the ballparks. This will be uncharted territory not only for baseball but for North America.
BNS: Eventually, when baseball does return, players will be dealing with a long layoff. In the past, were players visibly rusty once the games resumed after long pauses? Or was the action between the lines indistinguishable from any other game?
Thorn: I think that in 1995 starting pitchers were on a bit of a short leash at the outset – five or six innings, maybe, but that has become the norm in the quarter-century since (!). I do not recall fans (myself included) noting that a particular player or club was playing at a level below what they had come to expect. Even those fans who resumed their affection for baseball with initial reluctance/resentment did not assert that the product on the field was inferior to the one they recalled.
BNS: What about the off-field side of things: the All-Star Game and trade deadline, for example? Depending on how long the delay lasts, the league will have to consider changing the dates for those major events. What does history tell us about the options Major League Baseball has now?
Thorn: The charge now is to combine creativity with prudence, with concern for the health and safety of all who play the game and love it. Deadlines may be adjusted to reflect new realities, but cancelling the All-Star Game would be a tough one. While MLB experimented with two such games each summer between 1959 and 1962, it has never, since its debut in 1933, done entirely without one – not even in 1981, when a labor-management rift caused MLB to miss some 55 scheduled game in July and August (the All-Star Game was postponed to August 9 and marked the prelude to resumed league play).
BNS: There’s no doubt that the 1994-95 strike damaged baseball in the eyes of many fans. But in this case, it would be hard to fault players and owners for their actions given the public health concern. Far different circumstances, of course, and more than a century ago now, but did fans engage with the game any differently after players returned from the front lines of the First World War and the 1919 season began?
Thorn: I speak above to the rancour expressed by many fans after the events of 1994, which, most grievously to some, entailed the cancelled World Series. When the ravages of (the First World War) and the influenza epidemic were over, or at least no longer a present danger, in 1919-20, fans resumed their love of the game with unbounded joy, as the resumption of a full schedule (it had been 130 games for 1918, 140 for 1919) signalled a return to normalcy. The advent of a home-run hero in Babe Ruth provided excitement in the stands, in the press, and in the culture at large. Not even the disturbing revelations about the Black Sox Scandal, late in September 1920, made much of a dent in baseball’s popularity going forward, except in Chicago.
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BNS: Based on your answers, it seems that these periods without baseball can lead us to re-evaluate its places in our lives. After the First World War, fans embraced it. After the cancellation of the 1994 World Series, fans rejected it. Without asking you to speculate on what happens next, do you think it’s fair to say that these pauses have historically prompted us to reassess where baseball fits in society? Or is that a reach?
Thorn: Well, you don’t miss your water till your well run dry.
Even for someone like me, who thinks about baseball every day whether in season or out, delaying opening day’s tough. If spring is the season of hope, and opening day marks its onset, a fan cannot help but feel a pang this year.
I think the delay or cancellation of these special rites of spring remind us — not causes us to reassess — what a place the game holds in our lives.
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