It’s been an unexpectedly long offseason for the Brewers but, at least as of this writing, it hasn’t quite been the longest.
Major League Baseball passed something of a milestone over the weekend: Sunday was the anniversary of the first regular season games of the 1995 season, which featured the latest Opening Day in Brewers history. As of Sunday MLB teams have gone 210 days since their last regular season game. Here are some other long gaps between contests in the history of the sport:
1971-72: 199 days
The first lost time work stoppage in the history of baseball came at the beginning of the 1972 season when the players union went on strike due to a dispute over their pension payments, which at the time were not adjusted due to inflation. The strike lasted 13 days and delayed Opening Day until April 15. Nearly two weeks of games were cancelled and never made up.
The Brewers, entering their fourth season as an MLB franchise, were not greatly impacted by the slight abbreviation to the season: They missed six contests and went 65-91 anyway, finishing sixth out of six teams in the AL East. At the top of their division, however, there was some controversy. The division-leading Tigers and Red Sox played a different number of games due to the uneven nature of the cancellations and both teams finished with the same number of losses (70), but Detroit had one more win and advanced to the postseason.
1918-19: 228 days
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The events of 1918 have been in the news a fair amount lately as the “Spanish Flu” has once again become a topic of interest in light of recent events. The 1918 MLB season was halted early due to a different kind of outbreak, however: World War I.
An exciting pennant race ended abruptly that year when the MLB season wrapped up on Sept. 2, about a month ahead of normal: The Red Sox were leading Cleveland by just two and a half games (again, the teams had played an uneven number of games) in the race to represent the American League in the World Series, and had played just 126 games. They went on to beat the Cubs in the first World Series ever played in September, and the last one the Red Sox would win until 2004.
MLB teams did not take the field again until April 19, 1919, setting a record for gaps between regular season games that would last for nearly 80 years.
1994-95: 257 days
It wasn’t a war or a pandemic that caused the longest offseason in MLB history, however: A dispute between the MLBPA and ownership over the proposed implementation of a salary cap was the culprit. Tensions were already running high between the two sides following an earlier collusion scandal, continued to escalate as their collective bargaining agreement expired at the end of 1993 and boiled over on August 12, 1994 when the players launched a strike that would lead to the cancellation of a World Series and eventually delay the start of the following campaign.
At the time MLB was the first major professional sports league to lose a postseason due to a work stoppage. The lost conclusion to their season also halted several notable storylines: The Montreal Expos had baseball’s best record and were on pace to reach the postseason for just the second time in franchise history, Padres outfielder Tony Gwynn was batting .394 and had a chance to post the first .400 batting average since 1941 and Giants third baseman Matt Williams was on pace to break Roger Maris’ single season home run record.
Instead, the two sides fought bitterly into the following spring and the strike was not resolved until April 2, 1995, a day before replacement players were set to take the field on Opening Day. An abbreviated spring training preceded an April 26 Opening Day and the season was shortened to 144 games.
