By Mike Lopresti
Gannett News Service

Ten years later, the public seems to have forgotten. Or at least forgiven.

With the All-Star Game come and gone, baseball looks up and sees sunny skies. The pennant races are bubbling. The grandstands are full.

The summer of discontent seems long ago. Remember 1994? The All-Star Game was like the last days of peace before total war. Soon came silent ballparks and dark clubhouses. A bitter strike, ignited by the owners' desire for a salary cap, that would not end until the next spring, having devoured nearly a thousand games, the World Series, and every shred of good will from the fans. Not even negotiations in the White House could help.

Baseball seems to have been healed. By something.

"Probably," said pitcher Tom Glavine, "time."

Sure, 10 years of time. But also Cal Ripken and Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Arizona and Florida and Anaheim, and a dynasty in the Bronx.

"Fortunately," said Glavine, "there were some magical moments that reminded people why they liked baseball so much."

"We were very fortunate," said Robert Manfred, executive vice president for labor relations for the baseball commissioner's office, "in having a resilient and tremendously popular product on the field."

Notice how both sides talk of fortune? Maybe that is how the 10-year anniversary of the strike should be remembered today.

This might be the season that average attendance finally returns to pre-strike levels. The average in 1993 was a record 31,612. It has not been back since. But attendance is up 11 percent this year.

And maybe what should be celebrated 10 years later is the evidence that baseball might have learned something. Despite brinkmanship, the two sides worked out a new contract in 2002 without a work stoppage. The ghosts of 1994 were looking over their shoulders.

"I think we've come to the understanding," said Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina, Baltimore's player representative during the strike, "that we're better off working together than against each other."

And yet, there are still issues, still fertile ground for conflict, in a world of vast wealth. Ten years later, there is still no salary cap. But there is a luxury tax and revenue sharing, and the salary average actually dropped slightly this season.

The highest paid player in the game in 1994 was Bobby Bonilla, at $5.7 million a year. Alex Rodriguez will make four times that this year. The Yankees payroll that season was $44.8 million. Now it is well over $180 million.

That is a lot of money to haggle over. The eternal squabble.

So 10 years later, you can hear the relief in the voices, of how the game survived its nuclear winter. And also, from some, hints of the old battle. A reminder that you can never say never, when the question is asked if it could happen again.

The union man

Donald Fehr heads the Major League Baseball Players Association now, as he did then. He remembers the workdays in 1994 that went for 16 hours, seven days a week, in search of an 11th-hour breakthrough that never came.

"There's an intensity to it that I'm not sure can be described. ... People might have a tendency to view a lockout or a strike as an academic thing. When you go through one, you realize it's not. It's real. It has real effects on the people going through it. It brings home what it means not to have an agreement.

"Hopefully, what you end up with after that is a more professional working relationship. ... There's a lot more ongoing contact between the two sides than there was then. The game has grown significantly and that affects the thinking.

"You have to take (the 2002

agreement) as a good sign for the future."

The commissioner

Bud Selig was not officially named commissioner of baseball until 1998. But as acting commissioner, he was the voice of baseball during the strike, and he still remembers the night he called off the rest of the season.

"I'll never forget the drive home. After dinner with my wife, I sat in my house and I played over in my mind for hours all the World Series I could remember, starting with 1944. By the time the night was over, I felt even worse.

"It was unbelievably painful. I remember the hurt, how I felt, how everyone felt. I vowed I would do all I could possibly do. ... It was obvious we had to stop all that.

"I keep getting asked why we're having this renaissance now. You know why? Because we're all concentrating on what's going on in the field. The side issues, the anger, the bitterness - that's not visible to the public now. Relations are much better. But we'll have to work on that for a long, long time."

The baseball man

Manfred was baseball's lead negotiator in 2002.

"People remembering '94 is not necessarily a bad thing. ... When people forget how painful and difficult it was, sometimes it gets them in the mode where they're more willing to do it again.

"I would like to believe our labor relations have evolved to a point that we have enough lines of communication and enough positive relations that we would be able to avoid that kind of a fight.

"But some of that depends on the economy; '94 wasn't just about bad relations. It was about an situation that was untenable."

The player rep

Glavine was player representative for the National League, as visible a spokesman as anyone.

"I guess it's hard to say there isn't anything left over. I know there were a lot of people who were angry and said they would swear off baseball and never go to another game. I'm sure some of those people kept their word. How many? I don't know.

"That fight was an easy fight,

really, because a salary cap is something we're never going to agree to unless it's an all-out work stoppage and we get beat.

"I think there's a little bit more dialogue between the two sides now. More a situation of everybody's trying to do the right thing versus looking ... to see who is trying to screw somebody.

"That time around, I guess we won more than we lost. But we gave up a lot since then, too. There's no question that that stuff (luxury tax, revenue sharing, etc.) now having been in place is having an impact on salaries. But you know what? Everybody is still making a pretty good living."

The veteran

Barry Larkin is in his 19th season with the Reds and was on the bargaining committee in 1994. He says baseball still isn't back to where it was before the strike.

"There's more distrust between the players and the owners," Larkin said. "There's more distrust between the owners and the owners.

"I think the owners have to share more amongst themselves - willingly share more. I think it's obvious there are some owners who are in the game for I don't know what reason. That's really all I should say on that."

The reliever

Philadelphia reliever Roberto Hernandez was with the White Sox in 1994. The Sox were in first place when the strike came.

"We never thought it would go that long. Once they said the World Series was over, we felt like we were robbed. All you can do now is look back and say, 'What if?'

"(The owners) have created their monster with the big contracts they have given out. They've got no one to blame but themselves. If they're so poor, find another way to win. Develop the farm system. Build from within. The A's have done it. The Twins have done it.

"We gave in (in 2002). That was the first time we ever gave in on something. We were the ones reaching out trying to get a deal done. The night before the deadline, a radio station in Kansas City bought 10,000 seats and made up shirts blasting the players' association. The owner's son sat right in the middle of them."

Clearly, all is not perfect on the baseball labor front. But there is peace. Times are good. And there will be a World Series.

Martin Frank of the (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal, John Fay of the Enquirer and John Delcos of the (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News contributed to this story.