The AL Central and the division screwed most by the ‘94 strike

There are a lot of stories out there on the 1994 Expos on this 20th anniversary of the strike. Good. There should be. Calling that team a metaphor isn’t doing it justice. That team is a 10-hour black-and-white film about greed and heartbreak that won every award at Cannes and changed how you see the world. From the best team in baseball to death by seligicide in one decade.

However, they weren’t the only entirely devastated team after 1994. There were other Expos teams, underrated casualties of the strike that few talk about. We don’t talk about them because they made it out clean on the other side. They’re not the Portland Yeast right now, fighting for a playoff spot that makes their old city wistful. One of them eventually overcame decades and decades of failure to break one of baseball’s most underrated championship droughts.

Let’s talk about the 1994 AL Central, the screwed division that time forgot.

The standings on August 12, 1994:

That’s a karaoke party in Pompeii, an unchanging celebration buried under layers of ash and dust. Those will always be the standings for the 1994 season. There will never be closure to what looked like the best race in baseball. There were three teams contending, and all of them had gone through or would soon embark on worlds of pain. Fans of one of those teams could/should have been able to point back at ‘94 as the reason they follow sports, as a memory of why they plan on getting so worked up about 162 games every year for the next 20 or 30 years.

They were all hosed.

This is the one with a happy ending. The White Sox took the karma that should have also gone the Expos’ way and cashed it in for a championship. When I started seriously getting into baseball, the disparity between how the Cubs and White Sox were perceived fascinated me. The Cubs had a rough history, sure -- a legacy of losing that was documented in Norman Rockwell pictures and late-night jokes. But the White Sox were right there. When the strike happened, the White Sox hadn’t won a playoff series in 77 years. People were talking about curses with goats and transactions, but they were never talking about the curse that came along with throwing a World Series.

The ‘93 White Sox were an excellent team, one of the best in franchise history. They had a 25-year-old Frank Thomas, who was the kind of hitter that you knew would make the Hall of Fame before he was 10 years away from proving it. They had a young Robin Ventura and a mix of productive veterans. More importantly, they had one of the most underrated young rotations in baseball history. Jack McDowell was the old dog at 27, and Alex Fernandez, Jason Bere, and Wilson Alvarez were all having excellent seasons at 23 or younger. This was the White Sox team that was going to finally ...

They lost to the stupid team that won the stupid World Series the stupid season before. There’s no feeling worse than following a cursed team that loses to recent champions. The other team is so greedy; the world is so unfair.

That’s okay, though. Get back on that horse. The next season is a new chance. The pieces of the team were still intact, and everyone did their part again. Thomas was having one of the best seasons in baseball history. The young pitchers were just as good. They were going to make a playoff charge, a real run this time, and ...

Strike.

They weren’t very good the next year.

They were okay the year after that.

Then they faded away completely.

Three seasons after the strike, the White Sox made the infamous White Flag trade. Fernandez left for big Marlin money the offseason prior, and now Alvarez was gone. Bere was hurt and ineffective. All of the hope from those ‘93/‘94 seasons, gone just like that.

The White Sox aren’t the Expos because they eventually won. They rode an unlikely cast of young pitchers to a World Series win, and they broke baseball’s least-talked about curse. For a decade, though, they were one of baseball’s best what-if teams, along with the Expos and ...

Here’s a history of futility that didn’t go overlooked. The Indians were really bad for a really long time, and right when it looked like they were getting out of it ...

... they weren’t.

Except 1994 was the real start of the new Indians dynasty. Albert Belle, Kenny Lofton, and Manny Ramirez were on pace to have one of the best seasons from any outfield ever. They might be the best three outfielders who should/won’t make the Hall of Fame, collected in one outfield, each having one of their very best seasons.

Unlike the White Sox, the Indians didn’t fade into obscurity after the strike. They remained a force in baseball for years, winning a pennant with an all-time great team and revitalizing baseball in a great baseball city. Unfortunately, also unlike the White Sox, they never got that championship closure. They were almost there, so almost there, but they lost to a team that had been around for less time than a pack of Twinkies. They never got back.

Note: It’s always the Marlins. We’re talking about Loria-related heartbreak, World Series soul-spindlings, and lost free agents, here. It’s always the Marlins.

The Indians started the season 14-17, and having had seven consecutive losing seasons, things seemed much as usual, in many ways. From that point until the strike hit three months later though, the Indians went 52-30, best in the American League, and they outscored their opponents by 136 runs over that stretch, also the best in the league.

Cleveland still has a team, so they weren’t the strike’s greatest victim. But they were close. Man, how they were close.

Here we have an example of the unseen horrors of the future. The Royals weren’t in the middle of a championship drought. They had won within the decade. Between the World Series win and the strike, they had ups and downs, getting close and falling back, getting close and falling back.

They were in one of the getting-close parts of the cycle when the strike hit, and then they fell back. And back and back and back. They were disconnected from the space station and just floating in one direction. They have been until the last couple seasons, and we’re still not sure how this bunch is going to fare.

The strike was for the Royals what Sid Bream was for the Pirates -- an easily identifiable demarcation line between “normal team” and “unfair suffering.” The last time Barry Bonds touched a baseball in a Pirates uniform, everything went to hell, and that’s where it stayed for 22 years. When the 1994 Royals didn’t show up for their next game, the good fortunes and happy feelings of baseball in Kansas City also took a decades-long leave of absence. It took far too long to get them back.

Do one of these three teams win the 1994 World Series? Assuming two of them made the playoffs -- a huge assumption, considering that Baltimore was also lurking for the wild card out East -- there was about a 25-percent chance. Add in the Expos, and you have a 38-percent chance of something wondrous happening. The Astros are still without a championship, so you had a 50-percent chance of a World Series that was a unique little snowflake. Add in the possibility of an under-.500 team winning the World Series, which was possible with the delightfully miserable AL West, including the championship-free Rangers, and you’re up to a 75-percent chance of a Series to remember.

My goodness, we weren’t even sick of the Yankees yet. We weren’t even sick of the Yankees.

But of all the divisions in baseball, the AL Central was screwed the most. It was a three-team race of strong, healthy teams, all of whom were going through (or about to go through) different shades of turmoil. There were curses yet to break, and curses yet to start. The ‘94 season could have been a life raft in so many ways.

At least you kept salaries down and put a salary cap in place, you rich, short-sighted jerks. At least it was all worth it.