Former player, labor lawyer lead MLB as ninth work stoppage looms
NEW YORK » Tony Clark was a minor league prospect in the Detroit Tigers’ system and Rob Manfred a junior lawyer on Major League Baseball management’s legal team during the sport’s last work stoppage.
Now, they lead billion-dollar factions of a fractured sport that is headed toward a lockout that would start when the collective bargaining agreement expires at 11:59 p.m. EST Wednesday.
“His voice of being a player resonates with fellow players,” leader player agent Scott Boras said this week of Clark, who leads the players’ union. “That communication branch is a very important part of the union leadership. And I also think that Tony has now armed himself with a strong legal staff.”
Barring unexpected progress during talks at the union’s executive board meeting in Irving, Texas, it would be baseball’s ninth work stoppage and first since the 7½-month strike of 1994-95 that wiped out the World Series for the first time in 90 years. It also would be the first stoppage since the death of Marvin Miller, who led the players’ union through the first five stoppages and was a consultant to Donald Fehr during the next three.
Clark, 49 and a dozen years removed from his last at-bat, stands out in a crowd: He’s 6-foot-8 with a deep voice and a beard that has turned a professorial white. The former AllStar first baseman is the first former player to head the union, and was hired as director of player relations in March 2010. After union head Michael Weiner was stricken with a malignant brain tumor, he promoted Clark to deputy executive director in July 2013. Clark took over that December following Weiner’s death.
“I expected to be tied to the hip with Michael for 20 years,” Clark said.
Clark attended his first executive board meeting in 1999, became a team player representative and then an association representative, playing a part in the 2002 and 2006
bargaining sessions as well as negotiations on revisions to the Joint Drug Agreement.
“The idea of him being a player, you never forget that as part of his resume, but that’s not all he is,” Curtis Granderson said in 2013.
Manfred, the 63-year-old MLB commissioner, is a graduate of the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations and Harvard Law School. He was an associate when
his law firm was retained in 1987 as counsel for MLB’s Player Relations Committee, assisted in bargaining during the 1990 spring-training lockout and was promoted to partner in 1991.
Manfred assisted again during the 1994-95 strike and when a deal was reached in 1996-97, and then became an MLB executive vice president in 1998 under Commissioner Bud Selig.