Richard Ravitch

Richard Ravitch

• School Columbia University, Yale University

• Born July 7, 1933 in Brooklyn, NY USA

Biographical Information

Richard Ravitch is an attorney and politician who served as principal negotiator for Major League Baseball owners during the 1994 strike.

The son of a prominent Jewish family from Brooklyn, NY, he served briefly in the U.S. Army before earning his law degree and moving to Washington, DC to work on the Government Operations Committee of the House of Representatives. He then returned to New York to work for his father's construction company, which was focused at the time on building low and middle-income housing projects. That led to an appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson on the United States Commission on Urban Problems in 1966 and then to the presidency of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council in 1968. In 1975, he became chairman of the New York State Urban Development Corporation, saving it from insolvency. In 1979, he was appointed head of New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, once again undertaking much-needed reform to a system that was on the verge of collapse. He later rescued the Bowery Savings Bank from a precarious financial position and served on the board of governors of the American Stock Exchange.

All of this made his a very prominent name in New York City in the late 1970s and 1980s, and he considered making a run for mayor, eventually deciding to challenge incumbent Ed Koch in 1989, undermining Koch's reelection prospects and allowing David Dinkins to win the Democratic Primary, paving the way for him to become the city's first-ever African-American mayor.

In 1991, he was hired by MLB as head of the "Player Relations Committee", i.e. the department charged with conducting labor negotiations. He held the position heading into the bitter 1994 strike, in which the two sides' entrenched positions and refusal to compromise led to the cancellation of the remainder of the season and of the entire postseason. But even after that mess, when the owners realized that they were no closer to reaching their objectives, they decided on December 5th to let him go at the end of the month. Ravitch did not let them wait that long, handing in his resignation the next day. The owners did not replace him immediately and let the strike drag on until the following March when an adverse ruling by Judge Sonia Sotomayor fatally undermined their plan to hire replacement players for the 1995 season. They were forced to reach a deal and eventually hired Randy Levine to replace Ravitch as chief negotiator later that year.

He returned to public service in later years, serving as co-chair of the Millenium Housing Commission appointed by Congress in 2000. He was a Democratic Party delegate in the 2008 Presidential Election in which Barack Obama was elected. In 2009, he was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the state of New York when the position became vacant when a scandal forced Governor Eliot Spitzer's resignation, and Lieutenant-Governor David Peterson stepped in, leaving the position vacant. This was followed by a protracted legal battle over whether the appointment was legal, as the state constitution did not include any provision for filling such a vacancy, before the New York Court of Appeals ruled in his favor. His mandate lasted until the end of 2010, during which time he tried unsuccessfully to reform the state's budget process, an issue on which he continued to work in later years. He published his autobiography in 2014.