Has it really been 15 years since the baseball work stoppage to end all baseball work stoppages caused the cancellation of the 1994 World Series and threatened the sport's reverential status as the national pastime?
The reason I ask that question is that we're in the midst of another postseason in which the chasm between the small-revenue and big-revenue teams is very much on display.
The New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies, who appear destined to face each other in the World Series next week, represent the hugely populated Northeast corridor that generates more media-related revenue than any other section of the country. The Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Angels, the other two teams still in the postseason mix, thrive economically in the only other region with comparable population density.
If I remember correctly, the whole point of that 1994 labor war was to narrow the gap between the so-called large-market and small-market teams, even though the previous decade had featured eight World Series champions from cities that now would be considered - at best - medium-sized markets.
Want a little more historical irony? The day that the owners and players pulled the plug on the 1994 season, the team with the best record in baseball was - drum roll, please - the Montreal Expos, who are better known now as the 103-loss Washington Nationals.
Baseball owners were seeking to implement a salary cap back then because, according to acting commissioner Bud Selig, the gap between the haves and have-nots was growing wider and eventually would lead to an unacceptable level of competitive imbalance.
So, why bring all this up now?
Not to make any excuses for the Orioles, who squandered their position among those elite teams after being at the front of the new-stadium boom, but to point out what a lot of people already know. Major League Baseball has to make a new effort to achieve a greater degree of economic parity.
Of course, the Major League Baseball Players Association was able to fend off that 1994 attempt to place strict limits on payrolls, instead accepting a luxury-tax system that was intended to help teams in the lesser markets stay competitive. That approach, which has been tweaked several times since the original compromise, has succeeded in keeping teams such as the Kansas City Royals and Pittsburgh Pirates from going belly-up and allowed Major League Baseball to triple its gross revenues over the past 15 years, but Selig's competitive nightmare has all but come true.
