How the MLBPA can rebuild after Tony Clark scandal
Get past the salacious nature of Tony Clark’s downfall, get past the alleged inappropriate relationship with his sister-in-law — who was also an employee of the union he headed — get past the federal investigation into his leadership of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association, get past the detritus of a decade-plus tenure that imploded spectacularly on Tuesday, and what’s left is opportunity. In the midst of one of the lowest moments in more than half a century since its inception, the MLBPA can use Clark’s stunning resignation to help save the 2027 season.
Whoever ascends to the vacant MLBPA executive director position, which the union hopes to fill as early as Wednesday, will inherit an organization facing its biggest challenge in a generation: MLB owners intend to achieve a salary cap when the current collective bargaining agreement expires Dec. 1. The players are ready to fight him. However, for the fight to be effective, they must recognize that the biggest priority is to ensure that no games are missed following the expected league lockout. And this is where the actors themselves must hold their new leadership more accountable than the previous one.
When choosing a new union leader, players must make it clear what they want. This goes beyond “no cap”. He acknowledges that the game’s payroll disparity is alienating fans and in need of a major refresh. He embodies the fundamental principles of creativity, reflection and open-mindedness, meeting hard-line fanatics with solution-oriented proposals. It makes less successful players and left-behind middle-class players feel just as important as stars making $40 million a year. More than anything, it positions itself to guide the game away from its various apocalyptic scenarios and toward compromise.
It’s impossible to say whether the league and its owners, who are trying to upend a system that no longer meets their needs, will meet the union where it is. Perhaps MLB, emboldened by public polling that shows strong support for a cap, will stand firm on its position. If the union presents reasonable alternatives to the cap and the league still refuses to budge, the goodwill MLB has built up by claiming it cares about competitive balance will disappear.
It’s a delicate balance for the new executive director – with more than a dozen players familiar with the union discussions telling ESPN that the choice will likely fall on Bruce Meyer, the deputy executive director and former No. 2 to Clark, at least on an interim basis during those negotiations. After a meeting Tuesday afternoon in which some player executives pushed for a vote to confirm Meyer but were rebuffed by those who wanted to speak with teammates first, the union plans to confer again Wednesday and evaluate its options. Meyer has the support of most of the eight members of the executive subcommittee that constitutes the ultimate voice of the players. He negotiated the last labor agreement and should do the same for this one. He is the choice of least resistance.
It comes with the story. Two springs ago, former MLBPA lawyer Harry Marino organized a group to oust Meyer. Dozens of player executives, in an informal call with Marino, pledged support for Meyer’s removal. Clark, viewing Meyer’s assassination attempt as an indirect challenge to his own, mobilized allies to help save Meyer, who sent the players a letter of more than 2,000 words describing his accomplishments. In it, he references the 2022 negotiations, in which a 99-day lockout ended when the subcommittee voted 8-0 against MLB’s final offer, but was outvoted 26-4 by a base that did not want to participate in missing games for the first time since 1995.
“Some players came away from the negotiations disappointed that we didn’t achieve more and in particular that we didn’t miss games to see if more [gains] could be done,” Meyer wrote. “To be clear, I sympathized and still sympathize with these players and this position.”
Nothing in the 2022 negotiations justified losing games. It was a deal close to the status quo – a solid deal for the players, in many ways, but far from the fundamental change in the economic system sought by MLB today. Meyer can certainly argue that such posturing is simply meeting owners where they are — that a number of them, sources told ESPN, have said privately that they are so invested in securing salary cap space that they felt the 2027 season was a worthy sacrifice to achieve their goal.
Any position that depends on shelving baseball is short-sighted, ill-conceived, and exceptionally problematic, and if players want to maintain some sort of moral high ground, they cannot entertain the idea that shelving the game benefits anyone. There are many ways to maintain a no-cap game, but they depend on the union’s willingness to come up with smart solutions that satisfy both large and small market teams, a thorny proposition, but one that the union undeniably finds itself in.
The owners believe the union is weak, and in some ways they are right. The anonymous whistleblower complaint sent to the National Labor Relations Board in November 2024, accusing Clark of various improprieties, was initially dismissed by the MLBPA as “completely without merit.” Between the nepotism that indirectly led to his ouster and the continuing federal investigation into other elements of the complaint, his merit grows by the day and speaks to an organization with deeply flawed processes and unreliable checks and balances. It was common knowledge that Clark had hired his sister-in-law to run the massive new Arizona-based office, which current and former union employees called “wasteful” and “useless.” Nobody stopped him.
Despite failed attempts to expel Meyer in 2024, the players emerged from the rebellion with the intention of the union undertaking a full audit of its finances to highlight any waste or inappropriate spending. Instead, Clark commissioned a financial study — a much less in-depth study of the MLBPA’s books — that left players convinced that the union’s refusal to embrace full transparency meant it was hiding something. The Eastern District of New York, which impaneled a grand jury in its investigation of Clark and the union, is asking the same question.
How cynical was the base about Clark? Several Cleveland Guardians players, according to sources, planned to discuss whether he would be willing to take a reduction in his $3.76 million salary before the union abruptly canceled its planned meeting with the team on Tuesday.
It is at this level of interest, however, that the union evolves, from a group often sidelined or bored by the intricacies of labor relations to a powerful and intimidating group of 1,200 people. The MLBPA didn’t gain a reputation as the nation’s strongest union during its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s by chance. He set goals, figured out how to achieve them, and came together. Although members of the executive subcommittee preached solidarity Tuesday, it’s a trait that’s better shown than told.
And where this solidarity begins is from the bottom up. It is a strong union that guides its leaders, not the other way around. He can have honest discussions about whether, even in an uncapped system, bumper salaries at the top of the ladder give teams excuses not to spend on the middle class and whether there are solutions. He can say that, yes, the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Mets are great for players, but that that greatness comes at a price that could ultimately hinder the union more than it helps.
Meyer’s leadership style is, as one of his allies put it Tuesday, “furious outrage.” He is above all a fighter, a born litigator, and even if he has mistreated enough players to find himself on the verge of losing his job, they do not doubt his desire to take on owners. They also experience eras of great importance that require nuance and institutional knowledge, and whoever takes the reins must solicit brilliant ideas from agents; relying on former labor luminaries such as Donald Fehr and Gene Orza for advice; and recognize that union staff, despite any existing institutional problems, are competent and capable and would thrive in an environment that encourages them to find holistic solutions to complex problems.
There is hope there, in an MLBPA that, even if MLB hits it with cap proposals, does not forget its objective by getting lost in that of its opponent. The Tony Clark era, marked by questionable decisions, ended with an unresolved federal investigation and the disgrace of an executive director. The next incarnation of the MLBPA has to be something better. It’s not just the union that needs it. The whole game does it.
