In what years have there been baseball strikes in MLB?

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How many times have baseball players gone on strike?

With rich ballplayers and even richer owners, you wouldn't expect baseball to have labor problems. Just keep the turnstiles open, and let the money roll on in. Sadly, divvying up the profits is never that easy, and both sides are rattling their sabers again, and threatening another strike.

To find out how many times players have gone on strike in the past, we started with a simple search on "baseball players strike." We quickly found a page that outlined the eight work stoppages in Major League Baseball history. It turns out that the players union has gone on strike a total of five times, while owners have locked players out three times.

For an in-depth look at the acrimony and historical bitterness, we searched on "baseball labor history" and found a page detailing the labor pains that baseball has endured since its inception.

For almost 100 years, players were bound to teams through an outmoded system known as the "reserve clause." They were paid paltry salaries, while owners raked in the big bucks. Baseball players had a union, the Major League Baseball Players Association, but it did little more than administer a small pension. In 1965, the union decided it was time to play ball, figuratively speaking. The union hired Marvin Miller, a veteran labor organizer. The two sides began to butt heads more and more frequently, and in 1975, the reserve clause was struck down, giving rise to the free agent system.

Under the free agent system, players must stay with their original team for a specified amount of time, then they can offer themselves up to the highest-bidding team. Great for players, not so great for owners, who claim that free agency drives player salaries out of control. This system is a major point of contention between the two sides and, along with player compensation, has been the cause of every strike and lockout since the strike of 1972, which focused on player pensions.

BaseballLibrary.com provides a month-by-month chronology of baseball. For detailed information on baseball strikes, check out March and April of 1972, April 1980, June 1981, August 1985, and August 1994. In all, 1,718 games have been cancelled due to work stoppages over the years.

Finally, we turned up a 1969 article penned by great baseball writer Red Smith detailing the players' move to form a union. The article quotes the owner of the Pirates, who claims that unionization would be "completely destructive of the game of baseball." We fear that unless the current skirmish is swiftly settled to the satisfaction of all, we may witness that destruction firsthand.