Fehr No More: Baseball's Union Leader Retires!

All World All Sports

-Digger's Daily-

Major League Baseball Players Association chief Don Fehr is calling it quits after nearly 26 years as lead man for one of our countries most successful unions. Fehr replaced a legend union man named Marvin Miller who was largely responsible for setting up the mlb's current arbitration and free agency system.

Love him or hate him, during Fehr's tenure baseball's average salary went from approximately $280,000 to $3.2+M. His career consumed highs and lows. There's no question of his ability to negotiate collective bargaining agreements in favor of players gaining greater salaries. Greed has run amuck throughout baseball. Fehr made sure players got their share of the pie. Fehr successfully argued baseball owners were guilty of collusion against free agent players during the 80's (won $280M settlement). Since then, average salaries continue climbing to record levels.

I have one major complaint and a few gripes against Fehr. Performance Enhancing Drugs. For years Fehr lobbied against any sort of drug testing for major league players from cocaine to steroids. It's the steroids (PED's) which had fans in an uproar over the total disregard for morals of the game. The warning signs were there. Ken Caminiti, Jose Canseco and various sports reporters sounded alarms but nobody was listening until "The Game of Shadows" was published. MLBPA did everything possible to block testing for controlled substances for far too long. We know the rest of the story. However, Fehr was never forthright with Congress or America's fans until a perverbial gun was placed to his head.

Baseball's 232 day work stoppage remains another of my gripes against Fehr which lead to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. Lack of a true commissioner of baseball and MLBPA's silence when Selig was named "interim" (later to become "official") was a bit mind boggling. Selig was former owner of Milwaukee's Brewers presenting a direct conflict to the commissioners office.

Fehr's true strength was appearing as a pillar of strength when negotiating new labor deals. Rarely, at least not publicly, did he ever waver from public statements and collective bargaining demands. He's expected to officially step down sometime before March 2010.

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