When he introduced Judge Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday as his nominee for the Supreme Court, President Obama cited only one of her cases to make his argument that she replace Justice David H. Souter — and it wasn’t her opinion in Ricci v. DeStefano, a race-discrimination lawsuit. INsttead, it was a temporary injunction she issued to end the baseball strike in 1995.
“Some say that Judge Sotomayor saved baseball,” said Obama, who offered another paragraph of praise for her before saying she was raised “not far from Yankee Stadium.” While bestowing upon her Ruthian status (Babe, not Bader Ginsburg) is a bit hyperbolic, there is no doubt of the importance of her decision.
The players strike wiped out the playoffs and the World Series in 1994. It wounded the sport so deeply that baseball needed the record endurance of Cal Ripken Jr. and the home runs of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, whose slugging is now retroactively tainted, to recover its equilibrium and popularity.
Donald Fehr, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, does not portray Sotomayor, now a federal appeals judge, as the sport’s rescuer whose efforts produced the everlasting peace.
“Her ruling did not produce an agreement, but it gave the parties time to get on with normal business and get back to the bargaining table and produce an agreement,” he said. “If it hadn’t ended when she ended it, it would have gone on for some time and it would have gotten uglier and uglier.” And had it gone on, owners were ready to use replacement players.
Sotomayor, then a federal district court judge in Manhattan, was faced with a petition filed by the National Labor Relations Board seeking a finding of unfair labor practices by baseball owners. The players had struck over the likelihood that owners would impose a salary cap, which they did. After withdrawing the cap in early 1995, owners tried a new strategy: they abolished salary arbitration, centralized player negotiations with the commissioner’s office and ended an agreement not to collude on salaries, leading to the complaint by the N.L.R.B.
Sotomayor had to determine if baseball’s leaders had undermined collective bargaining by trying to abandon some of the fundamental ways in which they dealt with the players. The owners’ militancy symbolized their frustrations with player salaries, and with how frequently the union had outflanked management in negotiations and public relations.
The changes would have essentially let owners fix salaries — less than five years after an arbitrator had fined them $280 million for colluding on free-agent contracts.
Daniel Silverman, then the regional director of the N.L.R.B.’s New York office, said that even before oral arguments in the case, Sotomayor told both sides she didn’t need to hear witnesses or read any additional documents. “If she’d allowed cross-examination, the decision would have been delayed; the whole season could have been screwed up with replacement players,” he said.
He said that Sotomayor shrewdly understood that although labor law permitted each side in a negotiation to choose its representative, the competition among clubs for players’ services would have been diminished if all deals were negotiated by the commissioner’s office.
Sotomayor agreed with the N.L.R.B. that the owners could not willy-nilly institute their 1950s-style version of labor relations. If she did not issue an injunction, she wrote, “the harm to the players is the very one the owners’ unfair labor practices sought to achieve, i.e., an alteration of free-agency rights and a skewing of their worth.”
She added, “Issuing the injunction before opening day is important to ensure that the symbolic value of that day is not tainted by an unfair labor practice and the N.L.R.B.’s inability to take effective steps against its perpetuation.”
Gary R. Roberts, the dean of the law school at Indiana University, called it the “right decision from a legal and tactical standpoint,” and the one of the most important ones in baseball history, short of the Supreme Court’s antitrust rulings.
Sotomayor’s ruling restored the terms of the previous labor agreement so the season could go forward. Randy Levine, who became the owners’ chief labor negotiator five months after Sotomayor’s injunction, said her decision “gave both sides an opportunity to take a breath, to take stock of where they were.” Levine, now the Yankees’ president, added, “It led to the good-faith bargaining that produced revenue sharing, the luxury tax and interleague play.”
Sotomayor couldn’t will the owners and players to come to a quick agreement or prevent some old tensions from rising. But an agreement was finally reached more than a year later, in late November 1996. And there have been no work stoppages since.
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