Sotomayor helped to end baseball strike

On the day Judge Sonia Sotomayor delivered the ruling that essentially ended baseball's 232-day strike in April 1995, the Phillies' replacement players were summoned into manager Jim Fregosi's tiny office at Jack Russell Stadium in Clearwater, Fla.

One by one, they listened as Fregosi and general manager Lee Thomas thanked them for their six weeks of service. Sotomayor's ruling, they were told, made it extremely likely the striking regulars would soon return to Clearwater.

Jeff Hull, a 29-year-old pitcher and aluminum worker from Cressona, Pa., absorbed the disappointing news, then rose slowly from his seat.

"OK," he said, "but would you guys sign my bat?"

In that surreal spring 14 years ago, when teams of marginally talented replacements roamed spring-training sites and the ball was in her court, Sotomayor delivered a huge save for baseball's regular players.

The Bronx native, who was nominated yesterday to fill the U.S. Supreme Court seat now held by retiring Justice David Souter, helped resolve the bitter strike that shut down baseball late in the 1994 season and forced the unprecedented cancellation of the World Series.

The strike had begun Aug. 12. The longer it dragged on, the more fans became disillusioned. President Bill Clinton famously characterized the dispute as "just a few hundred folks trying to figure out how to divide nearly $2 billion."

The subsequent preseason, filled with wild rumors, negotiating breakdowns, bitterness, and confusion, was nearly at its end when Sotomayor, then a U.S. District Court judge, issued her injunction against the owners March 31.

Had she delayed her decision or upheld the owners' contentions, the 1995 baseball season would likely have debuted with the 28 franchises fielding teams of wannabes and has-beens.

In fact, those teams were packed and ready to travel north - the Phillies for a season-opening series in St. Louis - when word of Sotomayor's ruling reached the spring-training camps.

The news touched off a round of rumors and confusion as players and management waited for details.

"It's a state of confusion right now," Phillies president Bill Giles said.

The striking players, confident Sotomayor would rule in their favor, had voted to return to camp if she issued the injunction.

The National Labor Relations Board had gotten involved, much to the annoyance of the sport's powers, when it declared that the owners had violated basic negotiating tenets. Its three Democrats then voted to seek an injunction, superseding the two Republicans, who voted against the action.

On March 27, the case ended up in Sotomayor's New York courtroom. She conducted conference calls with lawyers for both parties and set oral arguments. After those arguments, she issued her ruling.

She wrote that she quickly had determined that the owners violated the National Labor Relations Act when they tried to end the free-agency and salary-arbitration systems. She ordered them to revert to the expired collective-bargaining agreement.

The owners "placed the entire concept of collective bargaining on trial," Sotomayor, who admitted she knew little about baseball, said in her opinion. (She is now an avowed New York Yankees fan.)

Her decision was upheld a few days later by a three-judge federal appeals panel. The players quickly returned to Florida and Arizona for an abbreviated spring training. On April 26, the season resumed.

"Those judges knew that if they reversed [Sotomayor], the whole thing would fall apart and we wouldn't have baseball," Gary R. Roberts, coauthor of a textbook on sports law, told The Inquirer. "I don't think they were prepared to do that."

The appeals court ruling was almost a foregone conclusion. By that time, the players had called off the strike and the replacements were headed back to their regular jobs.

"We never tried to pass ourselves off as a major-league team," outfielder and stockbroker Andrew Albrecht said. "But for six weeks, we had the opportunity to play and perform, and that's longer than any of us could have expected."

Sotomayor was lauded as a hero by long-suffering baseball fans and by the players.

"We thought it was well-written, tightly reasoned," Donald Fehr, executive director of the players' union, told the Associated Press yesterday in reference to her ruling. "She had done her homework, run a good courtroom. The experience we had there certainly would suggest that she would acquit herself well anywhere."

Inquirer columnist Claude Lewis, in a fit of hyperbole perhaps brought on by too much time without the game, predicted that her name would live alongside those of Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson, and Ted Williams.

It wouldn't be Sotomayor's last foray into the sports world.

In 2004, Ohio State running back Maurice Clarett tested the NFL's draft-eligibility rules. His case went before the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York, where a three-judge panel, Sotomayor included, ruled against Clarett.