Hey there everyone! Well I'm sure I don't have to tell you, but we're actually getting some live sports this week! And it's the very best sport of them all. Major League Baseball's 2020 campaign will officially be underway this Thursday evening, June 23. Four teams will get kick things off that night (including the Yankees opening up in DC against the world champion Washington Nationals), while the remaining 26 ballclubs (that includes the Mets!) will follow them the ensuing day. In a year full of hardships, there is finally something worth looking forward to.

And it shall be a baseball season unlike any other. We've had baseball seasons curtailed in the past, sure. And basically all of those stoppages were due to players' strikes. But this? This upcoming 60-game sprint to the postseason? We've never seen anything like this. No season has ever been this short before. It's going to be strange seeing the stands without spectators. And I can't even begin to tell you how strange it is that Opening Day is in late July. But it is what it is. It's here, and we may as well enjoy it. A two-month race to October, is better than nothing scheduled at all. We need to keep this in mind.

But I alluded to the reason I write today in the prior paragraph. Let's backpedal to three of those truncated seasons MLB has unfortunately seen in the annals of its history. Perhaps you remember them, perhaps you don't. Either way, I'd love to bring you all on a trip down memory lane and talk a little bit about what happened before and after the sport went on pause. While not a single one of those work stoppages resembled what we are about to see here in 2020, they still happened, so let's shed a little light on them.

Major League Baseball's 1972 Season 

1972 was the first time in Major League Baseball's history the players coalesced and went on strike. This took place near the conclusion of that season's spring training, with Opening Day not happening until April 15, a roughly two-week delay to the season's dawning. What was at the heart of this issue? The player's pension fund. They felt that the club owners weren't injecting enough money into it, and that their contributions didn't reflect inflation. Nonetheless, the issue did get resolved in relatively short order, and after 86 total games were lost during the strike, things got underway.

And boy was it a wild finish! The strike caused the Boston Red Sox to play one less game than the Detroit Tigers, who ended up clinching the American League East over the Sox by just a half a game. That's just the tip of the iceberg! Detroit would succumb to the Oakland Athletics (more on them in a bit) in the American League Championship Series, in a nailbiter of a series that went the full five games, three of which were decided by just one run. There were some memorable moments by both teams in that ALCS, but I know whenever I think back to '72, I always recall Detroit reliever Lerrin LaGrow plunking Oakland's shortstop Bert Campaneris, which then caused 'Campy' to fire his bat at LaGrow on the mound. Look at Tigers manager Billy Martin absolutely blow a gasket (wouldn't be the last time this would happen in his career)!

The A's ALCS win placed them in the World Series (the '72 edition is widely referred to as the Hair vs Square series) against the Cincinnati Reds. Had it not been for an extraordinary comeback in the National League Championship Series' final game on the part of Cincy (a game-tying home run by Johnny Bench plus a Bob Moose wild pitch), it would have been the Pittsburgh Pirates playing Oakland for all the marbles. Nonetheless, the '72 World Series did not disappoint, going the full seven games before a victor was crowned. And that winner would be Oakland, the first of three consecutive titles they'd win, and the first of five rings Reggie Jackson would collect during the 1970s. Angel Mangual would deliver a walk off hit for Oakland, though no player contributed more in the Classic than Gene Tenace. Tenace, who'd go on to become the World Series MVP, slugged four home runs over the seven games, and drove in two runs in the deciding final game, both being crucial as the A's just edged the Reds 3-2 at Riverfront Stadium for the title. Wow was the 1972 season a great one! To think how different it could have been if the work stoppage persisted! 

Recommended reading: 
 

Finley Ball: How Two Outsiders Turned the Oakland A's into a Dynasty and Changed the Game Forever by Nancy Finley

Becoming Mr. October by Reggie Jackson

Major League Baseball's 1981 Season

As you saw, 1972's stoppage took place in the beginning of the season. But 1981's? It took place in the middle. That's right! This season is infamously known as baseball's split season. Play stopped on June 12 and did not resume again until August 9, beginning with the league's All-Star Game. The reason? Free agent compensation. Owners felt that if they were to lose a premium free agent during the offseason, not only should they receive a compensatory pick in the MLB draft, but that they should also have the right to pluck a player off of the roster of the team that whisked their free agent away. All about compensation in 1981.

The players would have none of that, and a work stoppage ensued that would cost MLB 713 games, a little over one third of the season. Upon the resumption of play, the league and the union agreed upon "splitting" the season into two halves, with first half champions and second half champions meeting one another come October, a total of eight playoff qualifying clubs. This was before the advent of both Wild Card teams and the three-division alignment in 1995, and that we see in today's game. Back then, only four teams made the playoffs every year, so this was most unorthodox.

The result was a mixed bag. The two teams that had the best combined records over the two halves in the National League, the Cincinnati Reds and the St. Louis Cardinals, failed to be the first place team at the final day of either half, resulting in both of them sort of unfairly missing the playoffs. And over in the AL, the Royals would clinch a playoff spot by winning the American League West in the second half, despite them going just 50-53 over the entirety of the 1981 campaign.

But '81 did bring about some fun things too. It saw the Montreal Expos go to the postseason for the first and last time in their franchise history (more on that later). They would however get eliminated in the fifth and final game of the NLCS by the Los Angeles Dodgers, a game known forever as the Blue Monday Game, thanks to Rick Monday's heroics. And 1981 also saw the rise of rookie pitchers Fernando Valenzuela (of the Dodgers) and Dave Righetti (of the Yankees) dominate their respective leagues. Both men won their league's Rookie of the Year Awards, with Valenzuela also taking home the NL's Cy Young Award. Their two teams would also face off in the '81 World Series, where LA would avenge their losses to the Yankees in the '77 & '78 editions of the Fall Classics, and win their first title since 1965 in the process.

Recommended reading: 
 

Split Season 1981: Fernandomania, the Bronx Zoo, and the Strike That Saved Baseball by Jeff Katz 

They Bled Blue : Fernandomania, Strike-Season Mayhem, and the Weirdest Championship Baseball Had Ever Seen: The 1981 Los Angeles Dodgers by Jason Turnbow

Major League Baseball's 1994 Season

Let's do a quick recap here. 1972's strike took place at the beginning of the season,  which ended up being a fun and exciting one. 1981's strike took place in the middle of the season, which ended up kind of fun, but kind of weird and choppy at the same time. 1994's strike however, took place close to the end of the regular season, and the aftermath was no laughing matter whatsoever. It's arguably the biggest black eye baseball's ever sported. 

What happened? Well, there were a number of reasons why it happened, but at the heart of the issue was the owner's insistence that baseball implement a salary cap. That was something the players definitely were not in favor of. With baseball's previous Collective Bargaining Agreement having expired in December of 1993, the players/union were operating without any sort of locked-in vow stating that they had to play. However, the union's executive director at the time, Don Fehr, directed the players to play the season, but if things didn't get squared away by a certain date, they'd call it quits. That date, August 12, came and went without a resolution, and shortly thereafter the final 948 games of the 1994 regular season, the postseason rounds, and World Series, all were called off.

There were no winners and a whole lot of losers emanating from 1994's strike. The fans first and foremost top that list, but the sport as a whole suffered for quite a while, too. Attendance and fan interest wasn't what it was when baseball returned, and it wasn't really until the 1998 home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa when the sport could finally say with a straight face it had recovered in those areas.

The strike cost longtime Yankee Don Mattingly a shot at finally playing postseason baseball. The brilliant first baseman saw action in the 12 prior seasons, not one of them resulting in a Yankee playoff berth. 1994 saw the Yankees post the best record in the AL up to the day of the strike, and who knows? It could have been an earlier start to the impending Yankee dynasty of the late 90s had things not gone the way they did. Mattingly would play one final season in 1995, finally reaching the postseason, though his first and only career trip to the playoffs would be foiled by the upstart Seattle Mariners. He would never earn a World Series ring as a player.

But nobody lost more in '94 than the Montreal Expos. A franchise never successful outside of its magical 1981 split season run, the Expos were the ballclub with the best overall record in the majors when the season shut down. They would never recover, never see that level of success again, and their fans more or less stopped attending. They would remain in Montreal for ten more mostly-painful seasons, before the team relocated to Washington DC as the Nationals.

Recommended reading:

Up, Up, and Away: The Kid, the Hawk, Rock, Vladi, Pedro, le Grand Orange, Youppi!, the Crazy Business of Baseball, and the Ill-fated but Unforgettable Montreal Expos by Jonah Keri

Chumps to Champs: How the Worst Yankee Teams in History Became the Torre-Era Dynasty by Bill Pennington

Baseball is back. It's not going to be perfect, and who knows if it will make it to the end of October with the coronavirus still looming. But it's here for now, so let us all enjoy it. PLAY BALL!