Sonia Sotomayor didn't save baseball

George Will isn't impressed with Judge Sotomayor's role in ending the baseball strike and takes issue with President Obama's characterization of her having saved baseball.

"The president is a gentleman and a scholar and a great ornament to our society, but he's not a great baseball historian," Will told us.

"He says that when she ended the baseball impasse that was interrupting play in 1994 and 1995, she saved baseball," Will says. "Far from it. What she did was overturn in a sense, the essence, the underlies, the essential theory of American labor relations, which is the parties should slug it out because they know best and whoever wins, wins."

Will says that "in fact, what she did was take sides, took union's side against the management, and in so-doing, wasted 262 days of negotiations. That, far from saving baseball, consigned baseball to seven more years of an unreformed economic system, which happened to be the seven worst years in terms of competitive balance."

Sotomayor, Will says, "delayed the restructuring of baseball. So I would say that far from her saving baseball, as the president says, that in fact, baseball thrives now because we got over the damage that her judicial activism did in that strike."

Clearly, a president who supports the proposed card check law which would require mandatory government arbitration for labor disputes would like it when a judge shut down a strike and took labor's side.