The MLB Players’ Association became the most powerful and effective sports union through decades of unity and, largely, keeping any internal squabbles out of public view.
Yet during the typically placid midterm of its current collective bargaining agreement with Major League Baseball, an ugly power struggle has surfaced.
A faction of ballplayers has rallied behind former minor-league advocate and MLBPA official Harry Marino, aiming to elevate him into a position of power at the expense of chief negotiator Bruce Meyer, a maneuver top agent Scott Boras called “a coup d’etat,” according to published reports in The Athletic.
It reported that the union held a video call Monday night with executive director Tony Clark, Meyer and members of the MLBPA’s executive council, during which Meyer claimed Marino was coming for his job.
That spilled into a war of words Tuesday, in which Boras accused Marino of underhanded tactics that undermined the union’s solidarity. Marino worked with the union on including minor-league players in the CBA for the first time, which grew the MLBPA executive board to a 72-member group.
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“If you have issues with the union and you want to be involved with the union, you take your ideas to them. You do not take them publicly, you do not create this coup d’etat and create really a disruption inside the union,” Boras told The Athletic. “If your goal is to help players, it should never be done this way.”
Many current major leaguers were just starting their careers when Marino emerged as a key advocate for minor-leaguers. Meanwhile, the MLBPA took several hits in its previous two CBA negotiations with MLB, resulting in free-agent freezeouts in 2017 and 2018. In response, Clark hired Meyer, who seemed to hold the line and perhaps claw back some gains in withstanding a 99-day lockout imposed by the league.
Now, something of a proxy war has emerged, with Meyer and Boras clinging to the union’s longstanding notion that the top of the market floats all boats. Boras has had a challenging winter, struggling to find long-term riches for his top clients – pitchers Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery and sluggers Cody Bellinger and Matt Chapman.
While all four have their flaws – and the overall free agent class beyond Shohei Ohtani was the weakest in several years – Boras’s standard strategy of waiting until a top suitor emerges did not pay off this winter.
Snell only Monday agreed to a $62 million guarantee with the San Francisco Giants, who earlier this month scooped up Chapman for a guaranteed $54 million. Snell, Bellinger and Chapman all fell short of the nine-figure – or larger – payday many believed would be theirs, though they may opt out of their current deals after every season; Montgomery remains unsigned.
Marino seemed to sense a crack in the empire in a statement to The Athletic.
“The players who sought me out want a union that represents the will of the majority,” he said Tuesday. “Scott Boras is rich because he makes — or used to make — the richest players in the game richer. That he is running to the defense of Tony Clark and Bruce Meyer is genuinely alarming.”
The Clark-Meyer regime did make gains for younger players in the last CBA, raising the minimum salary to $780,000 by 2026 and creating an annual bonus pool for the highest-achieving pre-arbitration players.
Yet baseball’s middle class only continues to shrivel, a trend many of its fans will recognize. Whether Marino would be more effective than current union leadership at compelling teams to pay aging, mid-range players rather than offer similar, below-market contracts is unknown.
What’s clear is that a fight is brewing, one the union needs to settle well before the next round of CBA negotiations in 2026.
