NYT: Sotomayor’s Baseball Ruling Lingers, 14 Years Later

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/sports/baseball/27sandomir.html

By RICHARD SANDOMIR
Published: May 26, 2009

When he introduced Judge Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday as his nominee for the Supreme Court, President Obama cited only one of her cases to make his argument that she replace Justice David H. Souter — and it wasn’t her opinion in Ricci v. DeStefano, a race-discrimination lawsuit.


Doug Mills/The New York Times

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a Supreme Court nominee, ended a baseball strike in 1995.

Instead, it was the temporary injunction she issued to end the baseball strike in 1995.

“Some say that Judge Sotomayor saved baseball,” said Obama, who offered another paragraph of praise for her before saying she was raised “not far from Yankee Stadium.” While bestowing upon her Ruthian status (Babe, not Bader Ginsburg) is a bit hyperbolic, there is no doubt of the importance of her decision.

The players strike wiped out the playoffs and the World Series in 1994. It wounded the sport so deeply that baseball needed the record endurance of Cal Ripken Jr. and the home runs of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, whose slugging is now retroactively tainted, to recover its equilibrium and popularity.

Donald Fehr, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, does not portray Sotomayor, now a federal appeals judge, as the sport’s rescuer whose efforts produced the everlasting peace.

“Her ruling did not produce an agreement, but it gave the parties time to get on with normal business and get back to the bargaining table and produce an agreement,” he said. “If it hadn’t ended when she ended it, it would have gone on for some time and it would have gotten uglier and uglier.” And had it gone on, owners were ready to use replacement players.

FULL story at link.