Help Wanted: Union Leader Untainted by Scandal

On Tuesday morning, it was reported by The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, Ken Rosenthal and Andy McCullough that Tony Clark was resigning as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, a post he’d held since 2013. The news came the very morning MLBPA leadership was due to start its annual whistle-stop tour through all 30 major league spring training clubhouses. The MLBPA is also preparing for negotiations on a new CBA; all indications are that we’re a little over nine months from a lockout of some length.

While the timing of the announcement was bad, Clark’s ouster was not itself unforeseen. For about a year, federal agents have been investigating both the MLBPA and the NFLPA over financial dealings related to the group licensing firm OneTeam Partners. Clark was also the subject of a November 2024 whistleblower complaint alleging self-dealing and abuse of power regarding the MLBPA-owned youth baseball company Players Way. Surely Clark’s resignation came in advance of another shoe dropping in one or both of those cases.

No, it turns out. On Tuesday afternoon, Jeff Passan and Don Van Natta Jr. of ESPN reported that Clark had resigned in disgrace for a hitherto undiscovered reason: An internal investigation had revealed that he had an “inappropriate relationship” with his sister-in-law, who had been hired to work at the MLBPA in 2023.

That’s a new one.

The most salacious part of this story is the relationship, which has already generated — and will continue to generate — an avalanche of snickering and off-color jokes. To wit: We don’t know what, exactly, “inappropriate” means here, but whatever it is, it’s almost certainly something that most people don’t do with their sister-in-law. Regardless, I don’t know if the relationship itself would’ve been enough to knock Clark out of power.

I can see the argument that this revelation would embarrass the union by association, given that one of Clark’s most important roles is (or was) as the organization’s public frontman. You don’t want to head into a contentious and important negotiation with a leader tainted by this kind of tawdry scandal.

Within certain boundaries, Clark’s personal life, messy though it might be, is his own business. Here’s where it becomes the union’s business: He put his sister-in-law on the union payroll. Absent a so-called “inappropriate relationship,” that’s the kind of soft nepotism that gets grudgingly tolerated in every industry in America. In this context, however Clark is now redirecting union funds toward, well, someone who just got a lot harder to place at the family dinner table. Regardless of whether the relationship predates the job or vice-versa, this kind of behavior is frowned upon in most workplaces.

Remember Jim McGreevey, the first openly gay governor in the country? People remember that McGreevey resigned as governor of New Jersey in 2004 after he got outed. The whole story is that McGreevey gave a state job to the man he was having an affair with. That same man later threatened to sue McGreevey for sexual harassment, setting off a chain of events that ended with Bob Menendez going to prison 24 years later.

An extramarital affair, in general, is a personal problem. Not the taxpayers’ circus, not the taxpayers’ monkeys. Putting your side piece on the payroll, however, is the kind of thing that gets you fired, even from offices — like governor of New Jersey — that have traditionally been tolerant of a little graft.

And while Clark has neither been charged or convicted in either federal probe, we now have a pattern of alleged behavior that makes him look extremely untrustworthy. Among such behaviors, as listed in the Passan-Van Natta ESPN article: Clark, along with then-NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell, allegedly pressured an NFLPA lawyer to shut down a review of a bonus plan that would’ve funneled money to board members of OneTeam. (Did Howell himself resign in disgrace last year? Don’t worry about it.)

Then there’s Players Way, which has reportedly taken up to $10 million from the union, with almost nothing to show for it and even less in the way of explanation or transparency.

Indeed, this seems to be a case of the straw breaking the camel’s back. Clark might’ve gotten away with the relationship had outside counsel — retained because of the two federal investigations — not been conducting an internal investigation in the first place. And the ESPN article cites sources saying the union’s player leaders were already on the fence about Clark because of those ongoing investigations. This new scandal was just a bridge too far.

A Tuesday afternoon meeting of the eight-player executive subcommittee (which comprises Marcus Semien, Chris Bassitt, Paul Skenes, Jake Cronenworth, Brent Suter, Pete Fairbanks, Tarik Skubal, and Cedric Mullins, for those of you who want to keep those names on file for when the CBA runs out) did not end in a vote on a interim director, Passan says, though a choice could be made and voted on within 24 hours.

If someone’s going to take Clark’s place that quickly, that would seem to indicate an internal candidate, most likely deputy executive director Bruce Meyer, the union’s lead negotiator. You’ve probably heard his name before, either in the context of the last CBA, his role in Skubal’s arbitration hearing two weeks ago, or in the context of the 2024 insurgency that sought to replace Meyer with former MLBPA lawyer Harry Marino. An internal candidate, whether that be Meyer or someone else, would offer continuity during this essential time without the baggage Clark’s been carrying around.

Make no mistake, this is an important time for union leadership to keep its affairs, so to speak, in order.

I worry that we’ve become a little too jaded about lying and corruption in America. There’s just so much of it that it’s hard not to be inured. If you let yourself get angry every time someone in business or politics got caught lining their pockets with public money or defrauding investors, workers, or customers, you’d die of a heart attack before you got out of bed and brushed your teeth.

It’s bad enough when businesspeople lie, or steal, or embezzle. But I have a hard time working up a simmering moral outrage for the same reason I don’t get that huffy about players who get caught using PEDs: They’re just trying too hard to win. The idea behind capitalism is that the profit motive will eventually lead to everything required to run a working society. If there’s a need, someone will profit from filling it. You can find that logic more or less persuasive, but a CEO who gets caught with his hand in the till is following the same basic incentive structure our economic system is built on.

For a figure in a position of public trust, it’s different. People with a higher professional responsibility have to be held to a higher standard of behavior. Stealing from a client is one of the ways a lawyer can get disbarred; stealing from the church is one of the ways a priest can get defrocked. Time was, betraying public trust by taking bribes would get an elected official thrown out of office and into jail. (Just ask Bob Menendez.) Anyone so unable to curb their own base avarice can’t be put in a position of public trust.

Clark has seen the union through its most turbulent period in a generation. Under his predecessor, the late Michael Weiner, both league and union were too scarred by the 1994-95 strike to engage in the kind of trench warfare that’s now commonplace in every labor negotiation. Under Clark, the MLBPA navigated its first new CBA after Weiner’s death, then the contentious negotiations around the COVID restart in 2020, and then a lockout that was resolved over the objections of the players’ executive subcommittee. Commissioner Rob Manfred, a management-side labor lawyer first and baseball man second, has said the upcoming CBA — his last — will be legacy-defining for him. I’m highly skeptical that a lockout will imperil the 2027 season, but that doesn’t mean the negotiations themselves won’t be both vicious and high-stakes.

This is an awful time for the MLBPA to lose its leader to scandal. The CBA doesn’t expire until December, but union leadership — both the players and their professional staff — must set their priorities and marshal their forces now. Every day lost now weakens the union’s position down the line.

But this is an even worse time for the MLBPA to have a leader it can’t trust, a leader whose priorities and judgment can be called into question. Even the appearance of impropriety would sow doubt and dissension in a rank and file that already has thousands of voices raising hundreds of different, sometimes conflicting priorities.

The power of a labor union is right there in the name. Individual workers are weak; the power of the workforce, if wielded collectively, is immense. But everyone has to have the same priorities, and that starts at the top. If the executive director of the union is not totally committed to advancing the cause, how can the members be?