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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Tony Clark Resigns
Vol. 18, No. 2
February 17, 2026
MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark, who has led the players’ union since 2013, is expected to resign. Clark leaves his post as an investigations continue of both the MLBPA’s involvement in a joint-licensing program called OneTeam, and a grow-the-game initiative, Players Way, that seems to have been a money pit. Clark’s departure, leaving the MLBPA without its leader, comes against a backdrop of growing rancor, with the Collective Bargaining Agreement set to expire on December 1.
Clark has never been well-regarded in this space. Player unions are best led by labor lawyers, rather than former players. Clark presided over a decade in which the players have mostly been cut out of revenue gains, with teams getting better and better at exploiting a rule set built for the 1970s. He’s backed down from fights, making no claim for his charges on the billions generated by the sale of MLBAM. He and his deputy fended off a challenge to their leadership in 2024, and he now leaves his post with questions about how he handled the union’s -- which means the players’ -- money.
The coming CBA negotiations are a good reason for Clark to step down now. The players need to enter them at full strength, and they now have eight months to pick their leaders. My snap reaction was to think that the players will be better off without Clark, but the more I think about it, I am not sure.
The union, you may recall, accepted the 2022 CBA over the objections of the MLBPA executive committee. The players accepted a deal that rolled over the same problems present in the 2017 CBA, and added both expanded playoffs and a pay-for-performance element that Jerry Reinsdorf had been chasing for 40 years, without gaining the players anything of note. Clark was on the committee that rejected those terms, and now he -- and possibly deputy Bruce Meyer to follow -- is gone.
As I have written before, it is not at all clear that the players have it in them to miss games, via lockout or a strike, to defend even the current system. The DNA of Marvin Miller and Gene Orza, of Mark Belanger and Tom Glavine, is gone. A number of MLBPA veterans have retired in recent years. There are no active players, and almost no active executives, who remember the wars of 1981 and 1994, or the skirmishes of 1985 and 1990 and 2002. Every MLB player has grown up in a world where its peer unions in the NFL, NBA, and NHL have been broken, have acceded to a payroll band, with a fixed percentage of revenues and limited competition for players. They have grown up in a world where baseball teams have become expert, despite a nominally more free market, at keeping money away from players. It’s not at all hard to see the same players who took a bad deal four years ago taking a worse one in 2027.
It’s too early to tell where the MLBPA goes without Clark. Will they retain Meyer, a wartime consigliere, or change leadership teams entirely? Harry Marino, who tried to topple Meyer two years ago, may see an opportunity now. That decision will go a long way towards telling us what kind of stance the union will take this winter. Remember, the last labor lawyer to run the MLBPA, the late Michael Weiner, negotiated a CBA that was bad for the players and got praise for it because it happened without a work stoppage, and in fact was settled before the old CBA had expired.
No matter who leads it, though, the union faces the same problems I was raising ten years ago almost to the day. From February 16, 2016:
The MLBPA is no longer choosing between getting youth paid and getting veterans paid. Its choice is either standing in the way of industry trends or going to the owners with a plan that acknowledges those trends and rebuilds the compensation structure accordingly. This has to be the central battle in the upcoming CBA negotiations.
Clark’s MLBPA failed to demand that a compensation structure built for 1976 be updated for the baseball business of 2016. A decade later, all of the trends that limit the market for baseball players still exist, just worse. The current system isn’t working, but the solution isn’t to cave and give the owners the system of their dreams. Rather, the players must insist upon a new one that builds on the union’s longstanding commitment to a free market for players. Who leads the union will matter less than the ideas with which they arrive at the table.
