MONTREAL – At a retirement party for Donald Fehr, the highly respected executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association who left the post Nov. 30, 2009, Buck Martinez, a former vice-president on the union’s executive board, was invited to speak. All 30 player-union reps were on hand, as was the board, and with a leadership transition underway, the longtime catcher who’d been through dozens of labour fights during his 17 years in the majors decided to issue the current players a warning.
“I said, ‘I want to say this to you right now, because everything is so good, you guys have done really, well, you’re all in really good shape financially, and the game is in good shape, but don’t ever forget that the owners are always going to try to get it back,’” Martinez, the Toronto Blue Jays broadcaster on Sportsnet, recalled Tuesday. “Nobody had a history [with labour strife] and that’s why I told them don’t get complacent, because they’re always going to try to grab back things.”
Those cautionary words are particularly noteworthy right now, as angry players and agents continue to analyze the troubling off-season market. Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, citing anonymous sources, reported Tuesday that an unknown number of players and a group of agents were “agitating” to remove current union head Tony Clark, who replaced the late Michael Weiner in 2013, believing the association needs to be led by a labour lawyer and not a former player.
Precisely how severe their level of discontent is bears watching, although throughout the off-season player agents Sportsnet spoke to expressed wide-ranging concerns over the most recently negotiated collective bargaining agreement.
Will Clark be their scapegoat?
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The removal of an executive director would not be unprecedented for the players association, as Martinez was part of the board that fired Ken Moffett in November 1983. Moffett had served as federally appointed mediator during the 50-day players’ strike in 1981 and later was unanimously selected by the board to take over from revered union pioneer Marvin Miller on Jan. 1, 1983.
“A lot of the players liked Ken Moffett because he was popular, they’d jog with him, things like that,” said Martinez. “Then they found out he was a mediator – he always settled in the middle.”
Don Baylor, the board’s president at the time, told the New York Times after the firing that, “a lot of players felt we were going sideways.”
Miller returned on an interim basis after Moffett’s dismissal and a couple of weeks later remained on as a consultant after Fehr was named acting director.
Pivotal at the time was maintaining unity, Martinez recalls, which was challenging because of competing interests among the players. After helping to negotiate the sixth CBA in August 1985, Martinez remembers walking out with Miller after completing the agreement with commissioner Peter Ueberroth.
“Marvin said, ‘This is what I’ve always feared, they’ve divided the union over arbitration and pension,’” said Martinez. “The young teams didn’t care about the pension, and the old teams didn’t care about arbitration. They had found how to divide the union, that’s why we settled.”
Crucial at the time, he adds, is that the union’s leadership – Fehr, along with Miller, Dick Moss and Gene Orza to name a few – made sure players didn’t make any decisions in a vacuum.
“All of those guys laid out everything for us – these are the consequences if you agree to that, don’t look at this hand up here because their other hand is down here taking something away from you,” explained Martinez. “We made all the decisions, but we had everything laid out for us, the consequences of our decisions.”
Back then, every CBA negotiation was a ruthless affair, often involving a strike or lockout. But since a strike was averted with a last-minute agreement on Aug. 30, 2002, new agreements have come with far less acrimony amid exponential revenue growth for both owners and players.
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To put it in context, the only player still in the majors to ever experience being on the verge of a labour disruption is Albert Pujols, and perhaps prosperity has made them too comfortable. As Martinez points out, “This is my 51st year in baseball. I’ve never been asked by a current player, ‘Weren’t you involved in the players’ association? Weren’t you involved in some of those negotiations?’”
That’s why he laughed off talk that players considered boycotting spring training this year in protest of how free agency played out.
“There’s not a chance in hell because everyone is doing so well,” said Martinez. “It’s hard to get everyone to agree on one front.
“The owners had control for so many years, over 100 years. The pendulum swung over to the other side, and then in the off-season, the pendulum went back their way. The [players] didn’t know how to handle it, because everybody thought when I get to free agency, it’s going to be right there. Anytime you tie too many restrictions to free agency, you don’t really have free agency. That’s the bottom line.
“It’s not collusion, it’s not anything. Those are the rules and that’s how they’re going to use them. Plus, they have all the information to back up what they think – older players go downhill – and have all these computer analysts to help them, ‘Oh yeah, here’s the trend, and here’s 100 examples of it.’”
Without doubt the owners have learned to work the new rules much faster than the players. How they chose to respond will cast a long shadow toward Dec. 1, 2021, when the current CBA expires.
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