A question, these days, is how long the MLB lockout will last. It is a good question, if good questions are ones that are important and have no clear answers. To be clear, what follows is not an answer. But we’re curious if looking at labor stoppages from the past can give us any indication as to this lockout’s longevity. Labor stoppages in the big four sports leagues, since the 1994-95 MLB strike:
1994-95 MLB Strike
232 days. The entire ending of the 1994 season, gone. 18 games per team in the 1995 regular season, gone. Doomsday…at least by MLB standards.
1994-95 NHL Lockout
There was a ten-day strike a few years prior to this, but we drew the line with the last MLB labor stoppage. This one lasted 103 days and cost the league nearly half a season. Quite bad, but the NHL, as you may remember, managed to do worse a decade later.
1995 NBA Lockout
80 days, no games missed.
1996 NBA Lockout
Just a few hours. Crisis averted.
1998-99 NBA Lockout
191 days. Nearly half what became the 1999 season, canceled. Terrible.
2004-05 NHL Lockout
304 days, if my math is right. An entire season canceled. The worst labor stoppage ever in these four leagues.
2011 NFL Lockout
125 days, if my math is right, from March 12th of 2011 to July 25th of 2011. No games were missed.
2011 NBA Lockout
161 days, and again, games canceled. 16 of them, per team.
2012-13 NHL Lockout
113 days, if my math is right, and as with the 1994-95 lockout, nearly half the season down the drain.
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The takeaway here is that if these are an indication of what’s to come for Major League Baseball (and they may or may not be, we really don’t know), we’re looking at games being canceled. Only an 80-day lockout, like the 1995 NBA one, would leave more than a month for an abridged spring training. Every other one of these durations would stretch at least into March. Again, we could have stretched the timeline back further, but the point is that we have a lot of examples in recent years of disastrous lockouts. Only the NFL has avoided canceling games due to labor disputes. This is not at all unprecedented. Which makes it all the scarier for fans.
