![]() ![]() Jeff Frye was starting to worry about money. “We had routines and knew how to get prepared.” We knew what we had to do,” says Hentgen. “It was players-only because we had to stay together - we didn’t want any staff member or anything like that. Maintaining unity in a tumultuous time was a priority. Throughout, they had no contact with the Blue Jays front office or coaches, and no one from the club tracked their work, something unthinkable today. The off-season just went another month and a half.” We did exactly what we would have done, we just didn’t face live hitters. “There were two or three little ballparks, some bootleg mounds that were in between, and we made the best of what we had,” says Hentgen. When insurance issues forced them to find another venue, they moved to what was then known as Canal Park. Every day, while the machinations played out behind the scenes, they ran, threw, hit and trained as best they could. That’s why the next spring, rather than reporting for duty in Dunedin, Fla., Hentgen gathered with teammates Todd Stottlemyre, Randy Knorr, Mike Timlin and Paul Spoljaric at a high school in nearby Oldsmar to run their own training camp. Once the season was actually cancelled, “we were shocked,” he adds. There was a lot of talk about the ’81 strike during the ’94 meetings.” “We were listening to our leader, Don Fehr, and doing our best to stay together as a group. There’s not going to be a World Series,’” recalls Hentgen. “We were like, ‘Wow, this is actually going to happen. No one believed ownership would follow through on threats to cancel the post-season, but as the stalemate wore on, they began to understand that the resolve across the bargaining table was different this time. ![]() Hentgen was an assistant to team union-rep Ed Sprague, and they were confident there was plenty of time for the sides to resolve their issues and negotiate a new deal. “As players, that’s a group of men who love the game as much as anybody on earth. He boarded a plane home uncertain when he’d pitch again. Afterwards, everyone went their separate ways for what turned out to be a calamitous players’ strike. The previous night, he’d been on the mound at Yankee Stadium, allowing six runs in six innings in what finished as an 8–7, 13-inning Blue Jays win. Pat Hentgen was thinking it all felt so surreal. Sportsnet reached out to a cast of individuals who were working in baseball at the time, seeking to hear their stories and look back at the last time the sport was upended as it is now. Labour action began late in the 1994 season and, when the work stoppage finally ended at 232 days, it was the longest in North American professional sports to that point, and had seen the World Series cancelled for the first time in 90 years.īut while the issues of the day were drastically different from those in this current spring without baseball, some of the lessons learned still hold true a quarter-century later. That was 1995, when MLBers went on strike in vehement opposition to a salary cap and reduced players’ revenue share that owners were insisting was necessary to guarantee the financial well-being of small-market clubs. The last time MLB postponed opening day and shortened its season, the internet hosted around 3,000 websites and Tupac Shakur wasn’t only alive, he was incarcerated, recovering from multiple gunshot wounds suffered during a robbery, and yet to release his highest-selling studio album, All Eyez on Me. ![]()
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