Timing is everything. Just ask Fred McGriff, a newly elected member of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
In 1994, McGriff was having an MVP season for the Atlanta Braves. By mid-August the left-handed-hitting first baseman had already belted 34 home runs and 25 doubles with 94 RBI and was batting .318. Then on Aug. 12, 1994 major league baseball had a work stoppage that resulted in the cancellation of the rest of the season, the postseason and the beginning of the 1995 season.
For McGriff, the work stoppage couldn’t have come at a worse time. In the 10 games leading up to the strike, the 6-foot-3 slugger batted .421 with seven round-trippers. Fast-forward to July 15, 2004: That’s when McGriff played his last major league game. He retired with 493 homers in his 19-year major league career (1986–2004), just seven long balls shy of 500.
In the not-so-distant past, reaching the 500-home-run plateau meant getting into Cooperstown was a foregone conclusion. But McGriff didn’t tally 500 homers. He only had 493, and when his name first came up on the Baseball Writers Association of America Hall of Fame ballot in 2010, McGriff only garnered 21.5 percent of the votes. That was far short of the 75 percent needed to be elected. He stayed on the BBWAA ballot for 10 years until his eligibility on that ballot ran out in 2019. He never got more than 38.8 percent of the baseball writers vote.
Would McGriff have gotten 500 home runs if the baseball strike in 1994–1995 hadn’t happened?
Consider the fact that the strike cost the red-hot McGriff 48 games in 1994. The strike
