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Senior MLB Insider- ESPN MLB insider
Author of "The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports" - Close
ESPN Senior Writer- Host and co-executive producer of the new ESPN series, "Backstory"
- Member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national, explanatory and public service journalism
- Author of three books, including New York Times best-selling "First Off the Tee: Presidential Hackers, Duffers, and Cheaters from Taft to Bush"
- 24-year newspaper career at The New York Times and Miami Herald
Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark resigned Tuesday, leaving the union without its longtime leader less than a year before the expiration of MLB's collective bargaining agreement, sources told ESPN.
The resignation comes in the wake of the Eastern District of New York's ongoing investigation into the finances and other dealings of the MLBPA, including questions about OneTeam Partners, a multibillion-dollar group-licensing company part-owned by the union, and Players Way, a youth-baseball initiative, sources said.
Clark's resignation cast a pall over a negotiation already expected to be the most contentious in a generation, with baseball owners' expected push for a salary cap likely to prompt a lockout upon the current CBA's Dec. 1 expiration.
Player leaders plan to meet Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. ET to discuss the fallout of Clark's resignation, sources said.
The process for naming Clark's replacement is unclear, but Bruce Meyer, the union's deputy executive director, has been seen by several player leaders as the most obvious candidate to take over, according to sources.
Clark, 53, was the first player to lead the MLBPA, voted in as executive director in 2013 following the death of predecessor Michael Weiner.
Players had considered changes in union leadership multiple times -- including an attempted spring 2023 ouster of Meyer that Clark helped stop. But the investigation by the Eastern District, first reported by ESPN in May, led to questions that ultimately factored in Clark's resignation.
The union, which was scheduled to start its spring training tour of all 30 clubhouses Tuesday, abruptly canceled its 8 a.m. ET meeting with the Cleveland Guardians in Goodyear, Arizona.
"This happening during the investigation is not overly surprising," said New York Mets second baseman Marcus Semien, a member of the MLBPA's eight-player executive subcommittee. "But it still hurts. It's still something I'm processing, and I just want our player group to move forward this year and be able to have a good year of negotiating with leadership that cares about what players want.
"The timing being February, when we're looking forward to December when the CBA expires, is better than it happening in November if something came out."
Clark led players through negotiations that led to an agreement in December 2016, about 3½ hours before the prior deal was set to expire, and another in March 2022 after a 99-day lockout.
Meyer is set to be the primary negotiator in the upcoming labor talks. After Clark led the 2016 negotiations, Meyer was hired in August 2018 as senior director of collective bargaining and legal and was promoted to his current role in July 2022.
Meyer spent 30 years at Weil, Gotshal & Manges before joining the NHL Players Association in 2016 as senior director of collective bargaining, policy and legal.
ESPN's Jorge Castillo and The Associated Press contributed to this report.