Donald Fehr and the MLBPA

I meant to comment on Donald Fehr's announcement that he would be retiring next year, but I got busy yesterday. That's fortunate in a way because Joe Sheehan says it all way better then I would have.

There are jobs that demand of the person filling them that they be able to forgo popularity to do them well. No one likes public defenders. No one likes tax auditors. And no one likes the men who have chosen to represent baseball players as if they were a group of laborers in an industry long dominated by a paternalistic management and covered by an unquestioning press largely bought and paid for by the same.

Don Fehr took on this task and did it very well for a quarter-century. He did it as his peers in the NFL, NBA, and NHL all lost major labor battles and saw their unions weakened, or in the NFL's case completely broken and turned into a house union. The relative popularity of Fehr and his NFL counterpart, the late Gene Upshaw, ran in inverse proportion to how good each man was at his job of representing the athletes in their charge. Since 1983, when Fehr took over following the brief, unlamented stint of Ken Moffatt, the MLBPA has established itself as the most powerful players' association in sports, and one of the few successful unions in American labor. They won three grievances over collusion at a time when free agency was still in relative infancy. They beat management in the courts when necessary. Under Fehr's watch, we're into the longest stretch of labor peace since the players were serfs.

For this, Fehr became a reviled figure, first for not caving in to MLB's demands in 1994 and leading the players into a strike that lasted through the World Series, then for defending the principle of privacy, the right to refuse unwarranted searches, and the sanctity of collective bargaining, all as the public, management, and a grandstanding Congressional committee looked to trample all three.

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To some extent, Fehr had no chance to build a legacy. Marvin Miller took the players from servitude to freedom. There's no follow-up act to that. Miller was up against Bowie Kuhn and a set of owners with a plantation mentality; Fehr faced off against Selig, who yanked all of the magnates in line and presented the first united front from management that the players had ever seen. Selig learned by facing off with Miller, and because of that he was a tougher adversary for Fehr.

Sure, you can point to the $3 billion the players will take home this season, but that's a slightly smaller piece of the pie then they've gotten in the past, in part because Fehr and his players lost the 2002 negotiations, which set terms for restrictions on the labor market—givebacks—that are now the structural framework for all negotiations. The summer of 2002, when the media openly contrasted the negotiations with the events of September 11, 2001, and the amount of economic illiteracy in the coverage of the issues reached a peak, would likely have played out much differently a generation prior. The 2002 players were not prepared to strike, and Fehr recognized that and made a deal; that's leadership, even if it's not remembered as such.

Read the entire piece if you're interested in recent MLB history. And if you don't think Don Fehr was a tremendous union leader, ask an NFL player.

Via LGM.