Barack Obama, whose historical pronouncements to date have been remarkably dim-witted, did it again when he boasted of his liberal nominee to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, that she had saved baseball.The Prez "bases" that claim on Judge Sotomayor's injunction ending the 1994–95 baseball strike.
But in this Newsweek article, George Will, probably the most astute and knowledgeable baseball mind to be found among political pundits of any stripe, begs to differ.
...The basic premise of American labor-relations law is that conflicts between employers and employees are often messy, but it is generally best to assume that the two parties should be allowed to battle until reason, assisted by exhaustion, produces a settlement. Baseball's strike began Aug. 12, 1994, and Sotomayor ended it March 31, 1995, by effectively siding with the players' union. She thereby spared it the need to make significant compromises. This was not (in Obama-speak) judicial empathy for downtrodden labor against jackbooted capital. The 762 players' average salary in 1994 was $1,154,486.
What followed Sotomayor's intervention were seven years during which baseball continued living with an unreformed, dysfunctional economic model. Measured by payroll disparities and their consequences between the white lines, particularly in postseason competition, they were seven years of deteriorating competitive balance. Sotomayor, a Yankees fan, presumably did not know when she sided with the union that one of its fundamental objectives was to protect the Yankees' ability to spend, which the union correctly thought pulled up MLB's pay scale generally....
