So I'm working on a sports-centric timeline that I'll probably start posting later this month and I wanted to share some ideas regarding the 1994-95 baseball strike. I was researching potential ways to avoid it, and I'm surprised at how easy it would have been to do. That's not to say that the owners and players didn't have disagreements, they did. Revenue sharing, a salary cap, and the structure of free agency were all points of contention. But the owners and the players weren't so far apart that the issues couldn't have been dealt with. They arguably had larger disagreements in the mid-2000s and there were all resolved without a strike. As I see it, there are two reasons why the 1994 dispute escalated into a full-blown strike.
First, there was no permanent Commissioner at the time. After the Great Lakes Gang launched their coup against Fay Vincent in 1992, Bud Selig became Acting Commissioner as head of the owner's Executive Council. Theoretically, he was supposed to be in charge of finding a new Commissioner, but he was in no hurry to do that for obvious reasons. It wasn't until 1998 that the owner's finally dropped the ridiculous pretense and actually elected Selig Commissioner. There's a huge difference between a Commissioner and an Acting Commissioner. While they technically have the same powers, a Commissioner can only be removed from his position by a two-thirds vote of team owners. But the head of the Executive Committee is decided by simple majority and thus can be removed quite easily. In 1994, a real Commissioner would have been more secure in his position and thus could have afforded to be more conciliatory in negotiations with the players. But Selig had less room for error. He had to take a hard line with the players or risk losing his job. Instead of negotiating in good faith he basically just ended up issuing them a series of unacceptable "take-it-or-leave-it" ultimatums.
The second problem is Selig himself. Selig was a major figure in the collusion scandal of the late 1980s and as such the players trust him about as much as the Brits trusted Hitler after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Even if Selig had been willing and able to make concessions, the players were very wary of negotiating with him. Later on, his image improved somewhat, but in 1994 Selig is probably the worst possible person to be negotiating with the players. They simply had no faith that he was going to treat them fairly and had to keep him at arms length at all times.
Thus my conclusion is that the 1994 baseball strike probably would have been avoided in any timeline in which there (a) is a permanent Commissioner that (b) is not named Bud Selig or Jerry Reinsdorf.