AMERICA AT LARGE: The head of the players' union has left his mark in more ways than one after 25 years in the job

MONDAY’S revelation that Donald M Fehr was abdicating after a quarter-century as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) was a bit like Bernie Madoff announcing he was getting out of the investment business because he wanted to spend more time with his family.

For more than two decades Fehr presided over what is universally regarded as the most successful union in the world of sport, outlasting three baseball commissioners before entering into an unholy alliance with a fourth; and for all his accomplishments, it is this latter arrangement which will provide his enduring legacy.

Bud Selig may have presided over the Steroid Era of the American national pastime, but Don Fehr was surely its enabler.

That, over the past few days, he has been lauded by his purported adversaries as well as by his constituency probably speaks volumes about his performance in office. Fehr’s predecessor, Marvin Miller, who shepherded the MLBPA from its modest beginnings through the age of free agency, is reviled to this day as a subversive radical who brought the owners to the brink of ruin by undermining a status quo that had existed since the Stone Age.

Now 92, Miller’s Hall of Fame candidacy has consistently been blackballed (his most recent rejection came last year), but Fehr’s impending departure brought unqualified praise from the commissioner’s office, which released a statement from Selig saying that “for more than 25 years, Don has represented his constituency with passion, loyalty and great diligence . . . We have worked together to find a common ground for the betterment of the game, which will have resulted in 16 years of unprecedented labour peace by the end of our collective bargaining agreement”.

Fehr’s tenure saw astonishing gains for his membership in terms of free agency, revenue sharing and player salaries, but when it came to the most important single issue of the day, the labour peace Selig described was achieved in no small part by the willingness of both sides to treat performance- enhancing drugs as a bargaining chip, one that was usually the first item removed from the agenda in any negotiation.

It should be acknowledged that in his protracted opposition to drug-testing, Fehr evinced a stance that reflected the wishes of his membership. It may well be that his initial opposition stemmed from genuine concerns about personal privacy issues, and that he actually believed, as he long contended, the convenient fiction that the subject of steroids had no relevance to baseball, since strength-building properties would be of scant benefit in a sport more dependent on agility and hand-eye co-ordination.

The fact remains that in the face of overwhelming evidence he and his union resisted testing at every turn, with the connivance of the commissioner’s office, and that even today’s half-baked policy was adopted only because Fehr and Selig were bludgeoned into it by the threat of Congressional intervention.

Miller had been an anonymous labour lawyer with the steelworkers’ union when he was brought on board to organise the major league players almost half a century ago. The MLBPA was formally certified in 1966, resulting in a collective bargaining agreement that saw the minimum player salary rise – for the first time in two decades – from $6,000 to $10,000 per year.

When Miller took office, the average major league salary was less than $20,000. When he left in 1983, it was nearly $400,000.

Under Fehr it has grown to $3.25 million.

As a test case, the Miller-era union had backed Curt Flood’s challenge to baseball’s “reserve clause”, which essentially bound a player’s rights to his owner for the lifetime of his professional career. The US Supreme Court ruled against the union in 1974.

Flood went off to Barcelona, where he opened a cantina, but the groundwork had been laid. In 1975, an arbitrator declared players Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith to be free agents, establishing a precedent under which free agency became fact a year later.

Fehr, then a young Kansas City lawyer, had been engaged to assist in the casework for the McNally-Messersmith litigation. Miller was so impressed by his work that he hired him as the union’s general counsel, and nominated him as his successor when he stepped down in 1983.

The owners didn’t take long to test the new guy. Following the 1986 season, prospective free agents throughout baseball suddenly found themselves unwanted. It was a transparent act of collusion on the part of the owners, and Fehr ultimately won a $280 million judgment for his membership. In retrospect, it may have been the most significant positive accomplishment of his tenure.

“People tend to forget (the collusion case),” said Selig’s predecessor Faye Vincent. “That was $280 million that the owners stole – and that is the proper verb – from the players, and (Fehr) retrieved the money for the union.”

Although they are hired by the owners, prior to that episode baseball commissioners had been defined as honest brokers prepared to evenhandedly mete out justice in the best interest of the sport. When Vincent’s handling of that matter was determined to have been overly Solomonic, the owners summarily dismissed him and replaced him with one of their own.

The appointment of Selig, the Milwaukee Brewers’ owner, removed all pretence of neutrality, and by all logic should have rendered the relationship with the union more adversarial than ever, but it hasn’t worked out that way.

The Miller-Fehr era had been defined by numerous work stoppages promulgated by both sides. There were union strikes or walkouts in 1972, 1980, 1981 and 1985, while the owners locked out the players in 1973, 1976 and 1990. Those were followed by the most damaging labour dispute of all. After the owners attempted to impose a salary cap in 1994, the players walked out in August, initiating a strike that would last 232 days, wiping out the World Series and part of the next season, and thoroughly alienating the sport’s previously loyal fan base.

The disaffected public didn’t stay away long. The first full season after the 1994-95 strike was the one that saw Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs, Sammy Sosa 66, and Major League Baseball attendance top 80 million.

Fehr and Selig were so delighted by this that neither of them ever thought to wonder how this astonishing power surge had occurred, and they continued to divert their eyes as 40-year-olds like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens showed up with new, chemically-aided bodies and continued to smash records.

The era of good feeling that has prevailed between union and management owes much to Fehr’s and Selig’s mutual decision to ignore the steroid scandal – and the reluctant decision to incorporate drug testing in the collective bargaining agreement was made only because both sides deemed it preferable to a federal investigation.

Only now that he is riding off into the sunset has Fehr even obliquely acknowledged the folly of his role as baseball’s steroid enabler. “If I had known or understood what the circumstances were a little better then perhaps we would have moved a little sooner,” Fehr told reporters on a conference call hook-up earlier this week.

But, he added: “Having said that, I’m very satisfied that the series of agreements we put into place, especially the agreement that has been in effect for the last several years, has been good for everybody.”

Oh, yeah? Says who?