Over his 13 years serving as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association, the responses became almost boilerplate, prefaced by safe words such as, “But what I can tell you is this,” before issuing a verbal essay that could roll on thoughtfully for several minutes.
And in those mid-term years of collective bargaining agreements, he’d typically dust this one off when asked, casually, what was going on:
“Everything looks calm on the surface of the water,” he’d say, “but you look underneath and the ducks are paddling very hard.”
Those words resonate a bit more now, with Clark set to resign from his post as the head of one of the nation’s strongest unions just weeks before long and contentious talks are set to begin on the third CBA he’s negotiated.
The timing is wild, for obvious reasons: Labor war is coming. Clark, if nothing else, was always a good soldier. And at 53, he’s got the battle scars of more than two decades spent at the MLBPA. Ostensibly, he’s entering his prime negotiating years as he squares off for a third time against MLB and its owners, a group that sometimes makes it easier on him to win the PR war.
Yet those frenetic paddles beneath the surface took a bit too much oxygen in his final years.
It was a lot: The MLBPA remains under federal investigation due to its role in a licensing company co-owned with the NFLPA and other sports unions. The investigation widened in 2025 to include Players Way, a youth baseball charitable arm of the union that has been the subject of whistleblower complaints of waste, nepotism and, ESPN reported, excessive union spending on international and domestic trips for Clark and other union employees.
An insurgent group within the MLBPA’s eight-player executive subcommittee launched something of a coup in 2024, aiming to remove Bruce Meyer as the union’s lead negotiator. The three players – Jack Flaherty, Ian Happ and Lucas Giolito – were voted off the executive subcommittee that December, seemingly a victory for Clark.
Yet this is not the 10-toes-down stance a union would prefer its leader adopt as it nears what is perhaps the most important negotiation since standing firm on a salary cap in 1994.
While the union has been, relatively, flush with cash thanks to its licensing agreements, it’s also not hard to get outflanked by MLB’s cabal of attorneys and negotiators. Harder still when facing ambivalence from within and potential legal liability externally.
This is hardly the stuff of Marvin Miller and Donald Fehr.
Those two truly made the MLBPA a powerhouse, Miller guiding it toward free agency and a landscape that altered global sports for the good. Fehr was immovable in his approach, becoming one of the public faces of the 1994 World Series cancellation yet more vindicated in the coming decades as baseball exploded into a $12 billion industry, with player movement almost as large a cottage industry as the games themselves.
Weiner, far more low-key than any other union head, kept the labor peace and perhaps was more respected by friend and foe alike than any executive director. His 2013 death due to an inoperable brain tumor was devastating to the union on both a personal and professional level.
And it was far from ideal conditions for Clark to take the gavel.
The 2011-12 CBA struck under Weiner and Clark was also suboptimal from the union’s standpoint, as it heralded the arrival of the qualifying offer, which forced acquiring teams to forfeit draft picks when signing free agents. Suddenly, in concert with changes to the amateur draft and introduction of bonus pools, teams treated those picks like treasures.
In the decade-plus since, the qualifying offer has dogged almost every free agent – first the handy but not-elite veteran, all the way to the near cream of the crop: Alex Bregman, Blake Snell and Pete Alonso all had to pass twice through free agency to duck it, while young stars like Kyle Tucker and Bo Bichette aimed for opt-out laden deals this winter that will likely send them into free agency again, too.
Suddenly, the union was on its heels a bit and Manfred, now commissioner after years as MLB’s lead negotiator, kept on the offensive. In 2016-17, a lockout was narrowly averted, yet the union only nudged the luxury tax threshold from $189 million to $195 million, growing to $210 million over the five years.
Needless to say, that did not match the rate of revenue growth in that period.
Tony Clark’s MLBPA legacy
Meanwhile, owners established greater penalties for exceeding the tax, a governor on salaries for upper middle class clubs who might only occasionally bump their payroll into the penalty zone.
And the next two winters were ugly.
A glut of unsigned free agents forced the MLBPA to open a late-winter training camp for unsigned players. Former All-Stars loomed on the market past June, in order to avoid qualifying-offer restrictions.
And those who did sign late saw their performance suffer significantly.
The union could do nothing about it, except toss around a c-word – collusion – that hadn’t been heard for a while. And plot a holy war of their own for the next CBA.
Lest the union continue stacking Ls, Clark went and got his own pit bull – Bruce Meyer, a skilled litigator touting past experience with all four major men’s professional sports leagues.
Manfred responded with a lockout in December 2021. The union held firm into March, peace prevailed and the players might have clawed back an inch or two here or there.
Years later, at least eight teams are spending enough to exceed the luxury-tax threshold. Service-time suppression has been dealt with, and pre-arbitration superstars rewarded for elite performance.
Yet that deal seemed to come at the expense of the rank-and-file, which seemed to chafe at topline salaries remaining sky-high but veterans of lesser pedigree frozen out. In fairness, that may be an eternal reality with clubs hewing ever closer to “age curves” and other proprietary data.
Nonetheless, it’s all peanuts compared to what’s coming. It is hard to say Clark left the union in a better place, given the ground ceded and, now, a rudderless ship at a time the seas will grow much rougher.
Indeed, the paddling under the surface just got a lot more intense.