Top Five Most Awesome Sports Strikes Ever

By David “Large” Larzelere
As a television writer myself, let me tell you something – that writers’ strike was wack. And even though it’s over, I think it’s far from over if you know what I mean.
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I don’t know about where y’all live, but I’ve noticed a lot of people here in Davis, CA have stopped watching TV altogether. Sometimes they hang around the radio at night and knit rodeo pants and listen to Bob and Ray, or other times they just sit out on their front porch and sing field hollers while Pa plays the banjo. I’m telling you, I think the only way Hollywood is gonna get them good folks back watching that there tele-ma-vision is if they get all them writer fellas real zonked out on the roids and the THG so they can start setting some all-time writing records. That’ll put the fannies back on the couch, no doubt about it.
With that in mind, I bring you ... The Top Five Most Awesome Sports Strikes of All Time:
5 - The 1972 Baseball Strike
The strike that started it all. This first baseball strike only lasted for 13 days, but when it was over we all had ourselves some terminology that today is one of the first ten or twenty words any true aspiring fan learns as a baby – mmm ... arbitration. At the time, the whole thing seemed like it had been cooked up by the ghost of the Babe – the games that were missed during the work stoppage were never made up, and so the Tigers ended up playing one extra game than the Red Sox that year, a significant game in the end, because Detroit edged Boston by a half game in the standings to take the AL East. A lesser known chapter in the Curse of the Bambino.
4 - The 1981 Baseball Strike
The second best baseball strike ever, leading as it did to the infamous split-season playoff concept, which still must rank as one of the most preposterous inventions in the history of the game. I know Reds fans who still can’t quite get over the fact that they had the best record in all of baseball that year and somehow didn’t make the playoffs. It seems statistically impossible even now, but check it out. All those Leno reruns don’t seem so bad now, do they?
3 - The 2004-05 Hockey Lockout
What if you threw a strike and no one came? It was hard to tell what was more insulting to NHL fans, the loss of an entire season to strike (the only time this ever has happened in pro sports) or the overwhelming indifference that it was met with here in the States. On the whole, it was sort of like if the TV writers had gone on strike and suddenly realized that hardly anyone in America even owned a television and the few who did watched C-Span exclusively.
2 - The 1987 NFL Strike
It only lasted a month, but oh, the memories. Scab football was some of the most deliciously awful entertainment ever seen in the pro sports arena. Of course, it did also give Redskins’ fans one game to cherish forever, a Monday Night effort in which their super-scabs beat a Cowboys team that had many of its starters back. This, uh, led to a movie you may have seen. It stars Keanu.
1 - The 1994 Baseball Strike
The strike that had it all – scabs, a cancelled World Series, the hopes of Expos’ and Indians’ fans ground in the dust. And what’s more, chances are that without it the steroid crisis may never have reached such epidemic proportions. I mean, what more can you ask from a strike really? It was like a strike combined with a plague combined with a pirhana attack.↵