The Most Important Man In Baseball You’ve Never Heard Of – Huffington Post

There is no stronger union in American sports than the MLBPA, which will celebrate its 50th anniversary during the 2016 season. There have been union efforts in baseball almost since the sport’s beginning, but the MLBPA as it exists now was born in 1966. That year, players made Marvin Miller, a Brooklyn-born economist and a former negotiator for the United Steelworkers, their first executive director, a move that immediately began to reshape the sport.

Miller, who preached from the beginning that the union’s job was to provide an “adversary” to owners, negotiated the league’s first collective bargaining agreement in 1968, winning higher minimum salaries and the establishment of health and pension programs that even today are stronger than those in other sports. He led the first players’ strike in baseball history in 1972, then helped players win free agency three years later.

After the short-lived tenure of former federal labor mediator Ken Moffett, fiery labor lawyer Donald Fehr took over in 1983 and helped players successfully defeat owners in federal court in three separate collusion cases before the 1994 strike. Weiner was a labor lawyer who served as the union’s general counsel under Fehr before assuming the executive director’s role. Though Weiner’s tenure never featured a work stoppage, he went to battle with MLB over drug-related suspensions and constantly reminded players that “owners’ desires have not changed. They want to pay players as little as possible and control their services as long as possible.”

Clark’s pedigree differs from his predecessors’, but he doesn’t believe that affects his approach to the union or to its upcoming negotiations.

“My perspective is different, my background is different, my experiences are different,” Clark says. “The commitment is the same.”

As a player representative, a position he first held with the Tigers in 1999, Clark was on the front lines of negotiations in 2002, when players and owners came within hours of another work stoppage before striking a deal. Clark was an association representative, the highest union position active players can occupy, during the 2006 negotiations, and he helped Weiner negotiate the 2011 bargaining agreement. 

That has given Clark a wealth of experience at the bargaining table, and his time as both a player and a union employee also helped him forge relationships with those who will sit on the other side of that table this year. Clark and MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, for instance, have known each other for more than 13 years.

“We have a long and positive relationship dating to when he was a player rep,” says Manfred, who lauded Clark’s “commitment” to both the game and the issues that affect his players. 

“I’ve always regarded him as a positive force at the table,” he says. “The MLBPA has always been a player-driven organization no matter who the chief spokesperson was. It’s a real tribute to Tony that players had this level of confidence in him.”

Those who have worked next to Clark describe him similarly.

“Tony was always that guy [to say], ‘We want what’s fair.’ He didn’t believe in, ‘We’re gonna give you this if we get this,’” says Ray King, a retired Major League relief pitcher who served as an association representative alongside Clark in 2006.

Clark, King says, would remind players of former St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood’s fight for free agency, the battles the union waged to secure better salaries and benefits for players, and their duty to the players that would follow them. His mentality was, “‘we don’t want to take any regressions back … We want to push forward,’” King says. “He wanted the best thing for players coming up tomorrow, and also for the players that played yesterday.”