On March 1, 1996, the Orioles are in Fort Lauderdale, getting ready for their first games of spring training. The weather is great, players are back in uniform, and excitement is in the air. 

The previous day (Leap Day!), roughly 1,500 people attended an intrasquad scrimmage, marking one of the first times fans could see the offseason’s biggest acquisition, six-time all star, five-time Gold Glove second baseman Roberto Alomar, in the field with returning stars Cal Ripken, Jr., and Rafael Palmeiro. Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell said, “Watching Ripken and Alomar practice, especially in the midst of a crowd of mortals, is a revelation.” (Post syndicated column, March 2, 1996) Veteran outfielder Mike Devereaux spoke for all of Birdland when he told The Baltimore Sun’s Peter Schmuck, “You see those guys on the infield and it’s like, ‘Wow, what kind of team are we going to have here this year?” (Sun, p. 9D, March 1, 1996) So yeah, expectations are high.

Everything seems…normal. But under it all — far from my attention as a 13-year-old kid — baseball remains on a precipice, as the battle continues on one of the most visible fronts of the long-standing (global) battle between wealth/ownership/capital and labor.

Of course I remember the strike. On August 12, 1994, baseball stopped. There was no World Series. The year before that sunny day in Fort Lauderdale, in 1995, there was a very real possibility that a season would start with replacement players (Orioles owner Peter Angelos, much more on him in later dispatches, refused to use scab players and instead shut down the team’s spring training). 

At the end of March 1995, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the owners had not been bargaining in good faith, and a U.S. District Court Judge (Sonia Sotomayor, you may have heard of her) issued an injunction, binding both sides to the conditions of the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that had expired at the end of 1993. The players called off the strike, there was an abbreviated 144-game season, and 1996 appears to be ready to proceed as normal.

But while everyone is doing their best to put the strike in the rearview mirror, the reality is that on March 1, 1996, there is still no new CBA. The sides are still far apart, with the owners demanding revenue sharing and a salary cap, and the union saying, “hard no, brother,” as you would expect when the bosses say they want to put an artificial limit on what you could possibly earn.

Obviously, there is way more backstory here and we are parachuting in at a point in time to relive 1996 in real time. If you want to know more, about 10 years ago, Fangraphs did a very thorough history of collective bargaining to that point in MLB (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Over the decades, there have been oral histories and plenty of postmortems on the 1994 strike, with some correctly placing the blame where it lies: on the owners.

Spoiler alert, the entire 1996 season will be played without a new CBA, and labor negotiations will likely surface again during our daily reliving of the season, but for now, just know that while everyone is invested in driving up excitement for the new season, there is still serious animosity. (Speaking of which, the current CBA expires at the end of the 2026 season, and owners are again talking about a salary cap, so there’s a very real chance that some or all of the 2027 season could be impacted by a work stoppage. But in 1996, 2026 seemed an eternity away, so that’s where it will stay.)

While baseball may be facing an existential crisis nationally heading into 1996, baseball is BIG in Baltimore. In the shortened 1995 season, the Orioles still surpassed 3 million fans — more than 43,000 per game, and second only to the Colorado Rockies. They’d drawn at least that number each of the four seasons in their sparkling new ballpark, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, despite the team never making the playoffs in that time. (By comparison, the Orioles haven’t drawn 3 million fans in a full season since 2001, or even 2.5 million fans since 2005.)

In addition to the incredible baseball cathedral downtown, another reason that baseball was still king in Baltimore in 1995 was that on September 6, Cal Ripken, Jr., played in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking Lou Gehrig’s seemingly unbreakable record. Much more on Cal in later pieces, but for now, he is “The Iron Man Who Saved Baseball.” The Streak is still active heading into 1996.

So on a sunny south Florida day, March 1, the Orioles and their fans are embracing all the enthusiasm of spring training, when every team is undefeated. Tomorrow, the exhibition games kick off and we’ll look a bit more at what the game was like on the field in 1995 and what we could expect in 1996.

The #1 movie across the country on Friday, March 1, 1996, is the Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeifer joint, Up Close & Personal. Many see this as the preeminent TV news director and protege love story co-written by Joan Didion. Grab the tissues and sway to the theme song, “Because You Loved Me” by Celine Dion, which was bigger than the film itself.