Donald FehrThe man behind baseball's unbreakable union.
Posted Friday, July 12, 2002, at 10:40 AM ET
If Marvin Miller is the baseball union's Julius Caesar, the man who won the battles that established the union's dominion over the sport, then Donald Fehr is its Augustus, the man who has skillfully maintained the empire. Miller's accomplishments as union head were more dramatic—most notably, free agency, which has made some players astonishingly wealthy by allowing them to negotiate with any team willing to sign them. But Fehr's feats shouldn't be dismissed. He has fended off persistent efforts by the owners to topple a system that has shifted tremendous revenues to players. While other sports leagues have introduced anti-labor devices such as salary caps, Fehr has preserved and protected the baseball players' realm. Like a good relief pitcher, he hasn't blown the lead that he was given.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponFehr has now served nearly two full decades as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, and he has continued the union's unbeaten streak in negotiations. He led the union through a two-day strike in 1985, a lockout in 1990, and baseball's devastating 1994 strike that led to the cancellation of the World Series and the shortening of the 1995 season. Each time, Fehr and the union emerged with their golden goose—the status quo—for the most part intact. Through it all, Fehr's strong leadership—and his cranky, scowling demeanor—have led him to be widely reviled by the press and the public. But from a PR standpoint, Fehr is about to face his toughest challenge yet. The players are almost certain to go on strike before the season is over. Already the press is starting to gripe—unions generally aren't popular and a union of rich athletes even less so. Fehr, however, doesn't care about PR, only about improving the lot of the players who employ him.
Following Miller's practice, Fehr makes sure that the players are seated at the bargaining table, unlike his management counterparts, who often don't have an actual owner engaged in the process. Fehr is also, quite simply, smarter than the owners and their lawyers. Possibly "brilliant," says Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College and an expert in sports economics. Profiles of Fehr always mention his voracious reading of an eclectic array of books, but there's better evidence of his brains: He never loses.
What Fehr does isn't scintillating, Johnnie Cochran-style courtroom theatrics. He dutifully files unfair labor practice complaints or takes the owners to arbitration, as mandated in major-league baseball's collective bargaining agreement. But time and time again, he wins. Which is what good lawyers do.
In the late 1980s, the owners colluded in an attempt to prohibit free agency; Fehr took them through three years of arbitration hearings and won a $280 million settlement. When the owners tried to break the union in 1994 and 1995 by unilaterally imposing a new economic system and proposing the use of replacement players, Fehr—as he always has—outwitted and outlawyered them, with the help of the players' resolve. During his tenure, the average player's salary has rocketed from $330,000 to more than $2 million, and the minimum salary has quintupled, going from $40,000 to $200,000. Fehr leads more than the strongest union in sports. It's the strongest union in America.
Fehr's leadership contributes to the remarkable solidarity of the players' union, but he also has a number of institutional advantages on his side. For one thing, it's easier for baseball players on strike to maintain solidarity than it is for, say, steelworkers, because the players know that they're virtually impossible to replace. Of course, football players are difficult to replace, too, and that didn't help them in 1987 when the NFL replaced them with scabs. Players broke ranks with the union and crossed the picket line to play ball.
But baseball players never break ranks. The union's 8-0 record in negotiations—due principally to the leadership of Miller and Fehr—gives the players confidence that the union will succeed if they only give it time. Plus, unlike their NFL and NBA counterparts, baseball players have a shared experience in the minor leagues. As college players—even as high-school players—football and basketball players are lionized and become national celebrities. Young baseball players toil in relative anonymity, traveling by bus and working for paltry wages. By the time they reach The Show, baseball players understand the need to protect what their predecessors earned for them, and they stick together to do it.
Fehr also has a rhetorical advantage: In traditional management-labor negotiations, the union believes it has virtue on its side for defending workers against the capitalist pig-dogs. The pig-dogs, by contrast, defend the justice of the market. But Fehr has the good fortune to get to defend both. All the players want is to be paid their market value. If the owners aren't competent enough to work within their own budgets, why is that the players' fault?
And incompetent ownership has always been Fehr's trump card. In recent decades, baseball hasn't been led by a powerful pro-owner commissioner (except Peter Ueberroth, whose claim to fame is teaching the owners to collude and costing them $280 million in the process), and the owners have never been able to get their act together on their own. But under Bud Selig, the owners have been more unified than ever before. Perhaps more worrisome, the current president is not only a conservative Republican, he's also a former baseball owner who has used his office to unabashedly promote his old industry. That doesn't bode well for the union if this administration gets involved in negotiations as President Clinton did last time around.
Nor does it provide much hope for fans who don't want to see a work stoppage. If the owners won't promise not to unilaterally impose a new economic system at the end of the season, the players have no choice but to strike before the season ends, hitting the owners in their wallets. It's the only weapon the union has.
According to Roger I. Abrams' Legal Bases: Baseball and the Law, it's taken more than 25 years of free agency for the players' percentage of baseball revenues to return to the amount they kept in the 1870s, before the National League adopted the reserve system that prohibited free agency. Over the past couple of decades, the owners have been unrelenting in their goal: to take free agency away—through negotiations, through lockouts, through collusion, through salary caps. Largely because of the efforts of Donald Fehr, they haven't succeeded. But there's no reason to believe they're going to stop trying. And unlike this week's All-Star Game, it's hard to believe that Selig will let this competition end in a tie. Still, no matter which side wins, the outcome will be the same: The fans leave booing.
If you liked this Assessment column, check out Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses, and Animals We Hate, a collection of our all-time funniest, meanest, sweetest, and weirdest profiles.
News of the World Hush-Money Scandal: How Much Did Rupert Murdoch Know?
Obama's Nominee for NIH Chief Is an Evangelical Christian. And That's OK.
It's Way Too Soon To Call the Stimulus a Failure
I'm Having a Dinner To Celebrate My Divorce
Can the Kid Who Settled Child-Abuse Claims With Michael Jackson Finally Speak Out?
Fake News You Can Dance To
Notes From The Fray Editor:
randy khan suggested that Fehr wins because he tells the truth. (Suellentrop more or less agreed here.) Randy Moran noted that Fehr only looked brilliant when seated across the table from the owners. Most posters agreed that Fehr is a great negotiator, but faulted him for not foreseeing the consequences of his victories. These posts (such as Will Allen's exemplary contribution below) usually ended with a pledge by (or an exhortation to) fans not to return to baseball should there be a strike. Disgusted, The Slasher attempted to cut through "the myth of the fans." Finally, no story on baseball's continuing crisis would be complete without its share of goofy suggestions like mine (that we reserve the wild cards for teams with small payrolls) or Bernard Yomtov's, (that we fiddle with the roster sizes) here.
Remarks From The Fray
Another reason that Fehr always wins is that he, more or less, tells the truth, while the owners lie.
Owners lie most consistently about profits and losses. Owners have, among other things, paid themselves millions of dollars, sold TV rights to companies they owned for a pittance, entered into sweetheart leases with affiliated companies and just plain fudged the books to claim poverty over the years. The funny thing is that the prices people pay for baseball teams always seem to go up, so even an owner who says that he's been losing money for years generally manages to find a greater fool.
Now, it's possible the owners are telling the truth today. (It seems, in fact, that the current group of owners has a collective lack of management skills.) Given all the lies of the past, however, the players never will believe them unless the owners really open up their books (the real books) and let the players go inside at a level that would be unprecedented for the sport.
-- randy khan
(To reply, click here.)
Donald Fehr is NOT brilliant. Donald Fehr, as alluded to several times in the article, is simply pitted against the dumbest, greediest, most pin-headed group of noodlebrains to ever preside over a going concern; yes, The owners of MLB. Donald Fehr (and his obscenely rich clients)wouldn't last a month against business leaders who were smart and tough enough to do things the right way.
-- Randy Moran
(To reply, click here.)
If Fehr were pitted against business leaders who were intelligent, he wouldn't have to deal with idiotic proposals, either. The big problem in these negotiations is that the owners have dumb ideas and try to implement them. If the candlepower on the owners' side of the table matched Fehr's, then something might get done.
-- randy khan
(To reply, click here.)
Thirty years ago, if someone had predicted that NASCAR would be able to credibly claim that it's popularity was on par with MLB, they would have been told to get out of the sun. Now, the claim must be taken seriously, and we haven't yet discussed the NFL. The owners and players have failed to grasp that their main competitors are not each other, but other entertainment options, and thus their once- predominant position among spectator sports has continued to slip. The NFL and NASCAR are superb marketers, who continually strive to lure more fans, and once lured, do all they can to maintain interest. This is primarily accomplished through measures taken to maintain competitive balance among football and driving teams, which drives fan interest up. Baseball, due to their predominant position in the first half of the 20th century, never had to this; Baseball remained number one regardless of the fact that the Yankees won every year. As entertainment options exploded in newly affluent America, competitors were able to steal a march on baseball, particularly via television. Baseball, like many fat and happy operators, slumbered, and then went positively backwards as it ineptly managed it's labor difficulties. Now, labor and management seem to be unable to grasp that the size of the pie is just as important as what percentage of the pie one gets. Contempt for one's customers is a sure sign of long term idiocy, and Donald Fehr's clients and the plutocrats Fehr regularly bests have displayed this particular brand of idiocy for some time. The price will be paid.
--Will Allen
(To reply, click here.)
1. When I started following baseball in 1950, the players earned about 10% of the total revenue percentage that they earn today and most had to take winter jobs to make ends meet.
The fans didn't give a damn.
2. When the players began to unionize in the late 1960s, fighting at that time for very modest gains (the minimum wage at that time had gone up only 20% in 20 years -- WAY behind inflation), the fans didn't give a damn.
3. When the players began to make serious money, the fans began to rag on them, complaining when they struck out "hit it with your wallet." Any boob knows that a curve ball is as hard for a well-paid man to hit as it is for a wage-slave, and that the fan who is yelling that couldn't hit it in ten years trying. But the fans have paid their money and get to demonstrate how stupid they are any way they wish.
4. And now, with capitalist magazines like Forbes saying quite clearly that the owners are lying in their teeth about not making money, and with the proven record that no owner has ever sold a franchise for less than he paid for it, "the fans" blame the players for being greedy. The players aren't lying about what they make. Why do you side with those who do? When a man like Jim Bunning, a Republican conservative who has come a long way from being a ballplayer, still sides with the players, doesn't that tell you something? Like, if you know what's going on, it's not the players who are responsible for this.
5. There is only one reason not to go to a ballgame and that's if the price of a ticket is too high. I exercise that option myself a lot. But I don't blame the players, because I know that when the price was a lot lower, it was because they were artificially impoverished under a set of labor rules which I wouldn't work under for five minutes.
As Suellentrop, who is hardly a Communist, points out, a strike is the only option the players have to prevent the owners unilaterally imposing rules upon them which will lower their income. YOU would strike under those conditions.
-- The Slasher
(To reply, click here.)
Is Chris Suellentrop applying for a job with the baseball players' union, or contemplating making a move on Donald Fehr's daughter?
It's not unusual for some of the older professional sportswriters to get all misty-eyed about union solidarity against greedy management; not only do they remember the distant days of the reserve clause, but their own experience early in their careers with newspaper management prompts them to a certain gauzy romanticism about unions in sports. Most of these sportswriters are well past 60 by now, though, and I had the impression that Suellentrop was a younger guy.
The fact is that Donald Fehr has been fully complicit in some of baseball's worst decisions of recent years….
-- Zathras
(To reply, click here.)
(7/15)