The Strike
Baseball was marred this summer by a two month player's strike starting at 12:30 a.m. on June 12 finally resuming play on August 10. In total seven hundred and six games were scrapped, about 38% of the schedule. A makeshift playoffs were agreed upon by the owners pitting the first and second half winners leaving the team with the best overall record, the Cincinnati Reds (66–42), out of the postseason.
The series is sometimes called "The World Series that Never Was." This refers to the fact that the team with the best overall record (as previously mentioned), the Cincinnati Reds did not make the playoffs due to a modified playoff schedule established by the Commissioner Bowie Kuhn due to a midseason strike. In the NL East, the St. Louis Cardinals had the best overall record, but failed to make the playoffs after finishing second in each half.
Read more about this topic: 1981 World Series, Background
Famous quotes containing the word strike:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“Too long we prayed
God in the thunder,
wonderful though he be
and our father;
too long, too long in the rain,
cowering lest he strike again.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)