Peter Schmuck: Tony Clark fiasco has put the players union in a vulnerable position

I don’t have the time or inclination to fret about the tawdry scandal that led to Major League Baseball Players Association (MLPBA) head Tony Clark’s stunning resignation and – I suspect – neither does the union.

Both his personal issues and a troublesome investigation into the union’s finances could not have surfaced at a more inconvenient time with the clock ticking on the current Collective Bargaining Agreement and baseball owners stirring for another big fight over the game’s inflationary salary structure.

The CBA expires on December 1st, which means that the two sides need to get down to business if they are to avoid a work stoppage that impacts the 2027 season.

That won’t be easy, since the issue of a salary cap has reared its ugly head and the last thing the union needs is a leadership crisis that – if not handled right – could shake the solidarity of a membership that has gotten pretty fat and happy with the explosive growth of arbitration and free-agent salaries.

To that end, the executive board of the MLPBA quickly named deputy executive director and lead negotiator Bruce Meyer as the interim executive director and is expected to name a permanent executive director in the future. Meyer would seem like the logical choice, but a few other names have been floated, including longtime union chief Donald Fehr, who led the union through the disastrous 1994-95 work stoppage during which ownership unsuccessfully attempted to declare an impasse and unilaterally impose a salary cap.

Fehr would step into a leadership void after heading the NHL players union for 13 years before retiring in 2023, but it seems unlikely that at age 77 he would be willing to commit to what could be another long and grueling labor dispute.

Still, for those of us who covered the 1994-95 work stoppage that wiped out the 1994 World Series, it would be a fascinating rematch between Fehr and current baseball commissioner Rob Manfred, who served as a very influential outside counsel for MLB during that damaging showdown.

The economic impact and the public backlash generated by that dispute was so painful that the tenor of future negotiations seemed to reflect the knowledge on both sides that another such episode would be MAD, as in Mutual Assured Destruction.

Trouble is, few of today’s players were old enough to read in 1995 and all those militant owners who figured out that the words “salary cap” would continue to be considered a declaration of war by the union are not around to wag their fingers at the current group of billionaires who aren’t used to hearing the word “no” from their employees.

So, it remains to be seen if the amazing unity of the players union of the 1990s can be replicated when things get rough at this time next year. And whether the most influential ownership groups can convince anyone of their economic hardship while they inch ever closer to the first billion-dollar free-agent contract.

I’m not sure how the controversy surrounding Clark’s sudden departure will affect the situation. From a negotiation standpoint, Meyer was already the point of the spear, but it’s difficult not to imagine ownership viewing the union as vulnerable at this very critical juncture in the sports labor relationship.