IT WAS INEVITABLE

It's easy to forget baseball is a business. Most of us even say, professional baseball players are men playing a boys game. It maybe true.

But don't forget that owners are profiting from Major League Baseball, and don't forget about the players profiting from their success too. Everyone involved with making the baseball world turn is a business man. From the umps, to the players, to the owners, everyone is in baseball to make a buck.

So the strike of 1994 shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, it was inevitable.

The theory of revenue sharing created problems among all sides. Revenue sharing is currently used in baseball, and it is the idea that large teams exceeding a set payroll-dollar amount would be forced to pay a portion of their revenue to a pool, which usually consists of four to six teams. There the money is equally divided.

When it came to this idea, owners could not collectively agree themselves. Teams with large payrolls were reluctant to lose money, and teams with small payrolls were obviously in favor of receiving money.

Factor in that players were against revenue sharing because they felt it threatened the increase in player salaries. With revenue sharing, it was thought spending would go down.

On the other side, there might be the notion that a salary cap may have been the answer. Teams could have, for the most part, a set idea of how much money would be available to them and it would keep salaries from continually rising. The players could also receive contracts with guaranteed money.

The problem is both sides were split on this issue as well.

First, the players knew a salary cap would keep contracts low, with teams having a set amount of money available for player salaries.

Thanks to Marvin Miller's earlier years of "Baseball is a Business 101" players were adamantly opposed to the idea of limiting their opportunities to make money. The salary cap would undoubtedly limit an increase in player salaries.

And why would the players opt for non-guaranteed contracts. Sure these contracts may have forms of guaranteed money but every dollar in their current baseball contract was already guaranteed.

To the players, a salary cap would have been a step in the wrong direction.

Aside from proposed ideas, owners and players just didn't get along when it came to the business of baseball.

Here is a quick history lesson. The owners took advantage of the players in baseball's early years. In the 60's things started to change. Curt Flood wanted to become a free agent, Marvin Miller became head of the players' union, and the players wised-up. Free agency started along with salary arbitration, and since then players have had a choke-hold on the bargaining table.

These shifts of power led to a common dislike for one another, which kept the chess board of bargaining at a constant stalemate.

The only way this would have been avoided is if both sides could have employed the services of Doc Brown and his Delorian -- to get back to the future.