One on One with Don Fehr

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By Alan Schwarz
July 1, 2002


Don Fehr
Photo: Larry Goren
Don Fehr joined the Major League Baseball Players Association as general counsel in August 1977 and was named executive director in December 1985. Prior to joining the association, he was associated with the Kansas City law firm of Jolley, Moran, Walsh, Hager & Gordon, where, on behalf of the MLBPA, he worked on the landmark Messersmith-McNally free agency case.

As executive director and general counsel, Fehr, 52, serves as the players' chief negotiator in collective bargaining with major league owners, and has general responsibility for administering the other aspects of the MLBPA's activities, including contract administration, grievance arbitration, and pension and health care matters. In 1990, he successfully negotiated the $280 million settlement of the free agency collusion cases.

Baseball America senior writer Alan Schwarz sat down to talk with Fehr on June 27 in New York.

BASEBALL AMERICA: How would you characterize the state of the negotiations now?

DON FEHR: It's slow. We've had a series of meetings. We continue to meet. Some things change, but the discussions are not moving rapidly. It's not all that unusual in labor negotiations that they don't move rapidly. But you kind of wish that they would. It would be better. But we're plodding along.

“ I think everybody that knows Paul (Beeston) liked him and has a lot of respect for him. And in certain respects we had to start over a bit after last June, when his authority was effectively ended by the commissioner.”
BA: What's the tone of the discussions? Much has been made about the rancor and mistrust of the past. Are they that way again?

FEHR: I don't think there have been many rancorous meetings. In any bargaining remotely approaching the kind of bargaining we've had, you always have bargaining sessions in which some people get angry or they have hot tempers or tend to lecture each other a little bit. But I think for the most part the meetings have been, at least recently, sort of flat in tone--workmanlike, deliberate, if you will. I don't know whether that's a good thing or it's not a good thing. It just sort of is.

BA: How would you compare it to past negotiations, the six or so you've been involved in?

FEHR: The tone of the sessions at the table is much more even and much more flat than some of the prior negotiations I've been in. And quite frankly, more flat than it was in the spring. Now that doesn't necessarily presage the future. We'll just sort of have to see how that goes. This is not an easy process.

BA: What did Paul Beeston bring to the table when he was lead negotiator during last year's less-publicized meetings? How do you feel about his absence from the process?

FEHR: Well, I think everybody that knows Paul liked him and has a lot of respect for him. And in certain respects we had to start over a bit after last June, when his authority was effectively ended by the commissioner--about a year ago, then it was seven months or so before he eventually left. But it is what it is. I don't worry about such things because they're entitled to name their representative.

BA: What was accomplished in those three months, where at least reports have roughly 20 meetings that were productive?

FEHR: It's hard to quantify precisely what kind of progress you had. You develop sometimes a feeling in a negotiation that you're dealing with people with whom you can get a deal done. You don't know how yet, you certainly don't see an avenue yet, you certainly don't have an agreement. But there's a feeling that you get, especially when you've been doing it for awhile, that this is maybe something you're going to be able to find a way to do. I believe, although Paul can speak for himself, that was his view also.

And then back in June a year ago we made a proposal which I'm reasonably confident that Paul wanted to make a counterproposal to, and he could never get the authority from the commissioner to do that. And effectively, negotiations with Paul ended last June on that basis.

BA: Were you closer to reaching an agreement at that point than you are today?

FEHR: Oh boy, I don't know. I had a fairly positive feeling that we would be able to reach an agreement then. It's harder to have that view now. But I can't quantify it in a way that you're suggesting. It's not something that is susceptible to that kind of analysis.

Part of the problem with collective bargaining is that very often when there's a breakthrough, sort of everything happens at once. There's a tendency to say, "Why couldn't it have been done before?" If you're involved in the process, you sort of look up at the sky and think to yourself, "Well, the stars were not aligned back then." What I think is fair to say is the negotiations we are having now are far more reminiscent of the negotiations we had in successive periods over the last 20 years than the kinds of discussions we were having last summer.

BA: What role will the contraction ruling on July 15th play? Will that be any sort of turning point in any direction?

FEHR: It's impossible to say. It's conceivable, for example, that the clubs are awaiting that ruling in order to do something, and whatever it is we won't know until that ruling comes down. If that's the case, it may make a difference. I'm not one of those who thinks that it is likely to make a tremendous difference one way or another. And I say that because the whole issue of contraction has multiple effects that you have to contend with. If we prevail sort of across the board, then we still have an obligation to bargain in good faith about the issue of contraction if the clubs want to raise it. And they've indicated that they want to do that, so it's still out there.

“ In 1990, if we had been talking about contraction, we likely would have heard about Cleveland and Seattle, perhaps about Atlanta, perhaps about San Francisco even. Those are now, ordinarily, four of the top seven revenue producers we have. ”
If the clubs prevail on the bargaining issues then perhaps they will not have an obligation to bargain the fact of contraction, but they will have an obligation to bargain the effects. And the effects are sort of what it's all about. Rob Manfred has described the effects-bargaining obligation as "pervasive." Pretty clearly, though, whether you're dealing with 30 teams or 28 teams, it's very likely to affect the kind of an agreement that the players are going to be prepared to have. So, it's something which is out there.

I just think we end up talking about mostly the same things quite apart from what the arbitrator rules. Beyond that, there's another interesting development which has taken place, which is that back last winter, we were dealing with two clubs who were prepared to be contracted, and if there are two who are prepared to be contracted now, I don't know who they are. I know about Montreal, but I don't know who the other one is. So that's an issue.

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BA: Do you think the other team knows?

FEHR: Oh, I don't know. If there is another team that has been so identified, we have not been advised of that. I think it's likely that if the clubs prevail, and they try to contract, you will get the kind of resistance from some other city that they had in Minnesota and elsewhere. I'm not sure if it solves anything.

The other thing is that whatever decision is later made, it will arise in a different factual, a different contractual, and potentially a different legal environment than the last decision arose. If that's true, I'm not altogether sure how much guidance we're going to get out of this decision anyway. So I'm not one of those who thinks it's the sine qua non of trying to reach an agreement.

BA: What's your definition of the word "impasse"?

FEHR: Well, it's not a definition that I have to reach. It is a definition eventually made by the National Labor Relations Board in the context of the given case. But for lay purposes, it connotes the notion that you have had good-faith bargaining, that that's not in question, that bargaining is sort of exhausted. And that would then trigger a right by management if they so chose to impose terms and conditions of employment that were consistent with their bargaining position. Beyond that, it's impossible to describe because impasse is never discussed sort of generically, it's discussed in the context of a particular case.

Now, merely getting the impasse doesn't tell you very much because assuming you're there, which is an open question--the clubs thought they were there in '94-'95 and it turned out they weren't--but the players are not stuck with the result. The players still have economic recourse at that point, and so it's merely a step along the trail, if you will.

BA: Do they have to prove their judgment of impasse to Judge (Sonia) Sotomayor or her equivalent before implementing?

FEHR: That was in the context of the last agreement. It does not apply now. They would be separate legal procedures.

BA: I'd like to read to you a quote from an interview I did with you in the winter of '93-'94: "When we have a labor dispute, players have no choice. You can't even think about saying, 'Well, we won't go on strike this time, maybe we'll think about filing an antitrust suit.' We can't do what the football players did when the clubs went too far to try to restrain the market for players . . . they were able to file an antitrust suit and say the laws prevent you from monopolizing too greatly. We can't do that."

With the Curt Flood Act several years ago removing the exemption as it applied to the labor negotiations, do you guys have the option of filing antitrust suits, and if so, how might that make these negotiations different from the others?

FEHR: Players are covered by the antitrust laws, but a future Supreme Court decision after that interview, involving the NFL, makes it difficult to do that while you're still a union. And giving up the union status would be a very difficult thing to do.

BA: Why does the union oppose clubs sharing 50 percent of their local revenue, when at least on the face of it existing money is only being transferred among ownership, as opposed to payrolls being taxed, inducing teams not to pay higher salaries?

FEHR: We have a whole wide series of proposals from the clubs, and what we are trying to do is say not that we like luxury taxes above $98 million or do we not, or not that we like revenue-sharing at 50 percent or do we not. Although nobody, I think, except for the bargainers, understands what that means. It is to say that if we change the rules, can we reasonably predict the behavior of players and clubs under those rules? How does that affect the behavior? It's a mosaic. We're looking at lots of moving pieces. You cannot discuss revenue-sharing without understanding that there are other kinds of pieces that go in.

Let me just give you an example of the kinds of proposals that we've received. We have a proposal for 50 percent straight pool revenue-sharing. We have a proposal that was originally to take an additional $100 million out of the central fund and give it to the commissioner to do whatever he wants with; that's a proposal that subsequently has been modified down to $85 million. We have a proposal to have the clubs pay the pension plan contribution based on payroll--in other words, if you pay players more, you pay more of the pension plan contribution, even though the benefits are the same--so that's a luxury tax, a tax on payrolls. We have a proposal that would, in certain circumstances, allow the clubs essentially to establish whatever quote-unquote debt/equity ratio they thought was appropriate and enforce it. And remember that they consider for this purpose player contracts to be debt, even though accountants ordinarily don't, and other things.

We then were dealing with two proposals that would adversely affect salary arbitration, one of which would eliminate arbitration eligibility for certain players, the so-called super-twos. That was the issue in 1985 and 1990 both, so it's a real hot-button issue. And then a proposal to really radically modify the whole arbitration system in the clubs' direction by saying that once the player and the club exchange numbers, if the player doesn't like the club's number, too bad. He's stuck. But if the club doesn't like the player's number, it can just turn him loose. That turned salary arbitration into sort of a one-way street. And so we're looking at, in addition to other things, this whole wide variety of proposals.

The question we ask is, "How does this affect the behavior of the clubs? How does it affect the behavior of the players?" We're trying to predict behavior. And it's pretty bizarre--when you consider that if you apply the clubs' proposals to the top 10 revenue producers in baseball, and if you treat their profit and loss numbers as real, it takes every one of the top 10 revenue producers and throws them into the red, or much further into the red. Every single one of them. And we're sitting there saying, well, What is this likely to do? Aid the industry? Why do you want to do that to your best revenue producers? And secondly, what does that do to player salaries?

Then we say, in addition to that, when you're dealing with revenue-sharing, do the tax rates matter? In other words, if a club is going to generate revenue, and it has to pay a healthy portion of it to other people who have no risk, and it has 100 percent of the risk, at some point with your tax rates, that becomes significant. We think that a 50 percent marginal tax rate is significant. We think you have to be careful so you don't effectively say, "We will clamp down on the incentive to invest and grow the game." And that's important in baseball for a really critical reason. And it's so much different than football that it really underscores the differences between the sports.


In football, somewhere in the neighborhood of two-thirds of all the revenue is generated centrally, from television. The remaining third is mostly gate receipts. But you're only selling out eight games a year, and most of them are on Sunday afternoons. So within certain broad ranges, what you do locally doesn't matter all that much. You can argue whether that's good or bad. And you can argue whether it's good or bad that your TV revenue is the same if you're 16-0 or 0-16, but that's the way they do it.

In baseball, by contrast, approximately 84 percent of the money is generated locally. You're not selling eight games. You're selling 81. And you're selling for broadcast somewhere between 140-162 games. Certainly that's the case for most clubs. Well, what does that mean? It means what you do locally, how well you run your team, not only matters--it matters more than anything else, to the point where it may be the only thing which does matter. Quite literally.

So the question is, is the way to improve the game to effectively strip those clubs which generate significant dollars of their incentive to go out and generate dollars? People say there are some clubs that just can't make it. We do have revenue-sharing; we have proposed substantially greater revenue-sharing. We just don't think it ought to be at the level which the clubs have suggested, for these reasons. But we do know certain phenomena that are quite significant.

In 1990, if we had been talking about contraction, we likely would have heard about Cleveland and Seattle, perhaps about Atlanta, perhaps about San Francisco even. Those are now, ordinarily, four of the top seven revenue producers we have. What does that mean? It means the notion that somehow there was something wrong with a market like Seattle, such that there was nothing you could do to fix it, which was the common wisdom, is simply not supported by the evidence. So the trick is, how do we provide additional help to those franchises, while not essentially just stripping the higher income franchises of the fruits of their efforts? These are not irrelevant considerations, because they can reasonably be expected to affect the behavior of the owners of those teams.

This is a long answer, I know. But this is why it's a complicated issue. So when we look at what the effect is of revenue sharing and all these other things, we say, well, it's not just revenue-sharing: It's revenue-sharing, plus a luxury tax, plus the additional luxury tax related to the pension- and healthcare-plan contribution, the salary arbitration changes, and before they removed it from the table the information bank they wanted for free agents.

What we see is a pattern of proposals which do not appear to be neutral. They appear to be very, very aggressive on the club standpoint. And we don't think they're good for the industry. We also don't think they're good for players, but we affirmatively don't think they're good for the industry.

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BA: Is it possible for the union to accept any sort of institutional disincentive for owners, presumably high-revenue owners, to invest as much as they otherwise would in players? Or does it have to be an individual restraint, the fear of going broke?

FEHR: Since 1976, when free agency came in, in every single negotiation pressure has been put on the players by the clubs to find some reason to restrain salaries. Every single bargaining round. And at every single bargaining round, the players have ended up doing something in that regard, as far as I can tell. Just take for example, you know, you can't be a free agent until you've been in the major leagues for six years. That's more than the career length of most players. Which means that for the majority of players, never in their career do they have a meaningful opportunity to go and look for a job. That's an extraordinary thing for the clubs to suggest.

We have had taxes in the last agreement. We've had, in 1981, certain clubs opt out of the free-agent market for type A players. There have been a lot of things there. So, the notion somehow that we haven't been responsive is, in my judgment, not accurate. What is accurate is that no amount of response we would give would ever be sufficient from one agreement to the next. That's clear. And it's understandable. The clubs always would like to pay less. Any employer wants to pay less.

The Players Association did not come in and say, "Make everybody a free agent, day one." We did not come in and say, "We want a minimum salary of some huge number beyond anybody's reasonable expectation." We didn't say, "You can't release players." We haven't said all contracts have to be guaranteed. There is a whole raft of things. We're put on the defensive, and when the clubs come in, what they end up saying is this, and this is a very difficult thing for any union to accept: We want the union to agree that we (the clubs) will not be permitted to pay an individual player as much as we would pay him if the union didn't agree.

Further, in a normal industry, somebody comes to the players and they say, "We can't afford to make this product, because our labor costs are too high. We can't sell it." That's because the labor costs are built in. They aren't here. The only thing that's built in is the minimum. It's a very small proportion of the overall salary bill. So clubs have the ability to adjust their own payrolls in a manner that they believe appropriate.

So how do we end up with all of this? We don't like luxury taxes. The whole notion of penalizing somebody for hiring someone is, in the context of the United States of America, at this point in our development, I respectfully suggest, a pretty strange thing. We nevertheless will be negotiating about these things. We believe that if revenue sharing is done right, it should obviate the need for such direct restraints. The clubs have not indicated that.

We have an obligation to bargain in good faith about their proposals. We will. I'm not going to predict the result.

BA: I think the reason that the players are put on the defensive is that in the public's mind, it isn't they're just playing a game and they should consider themselves lucky to be baseball players. I hope we're past that. It's that they appear to have it pretty good, the six-year wait to free agency notwithstanding. Whereas the clubs claim, to debated degrees of accuracy, that they're losing money hand over fist. Certainly the players don't appear to be losing money. And so maybe there is a more even ground.

FEHR: In fact, that's not the approach they're taking. The approach they're taking is that certain clubs have a more difficult time competing than other clubs do. And that's salary-related. Which raises a whole host of other questions that you get into. Look, we will be bargaining about these things. You can't look at a luxury tax in isolation. It has to be looked at in connection with everything else.

You're going to say that Club A is going to have to write huge checks to the other clubs, then you're going to say that having sacrificed substantial parts of their ability to sign players and compete, we now want to throw some more restrictions on them. That becomes a pretty difficult thing to do.

BA: What happens if it grows the industry by increasing competition, generating more dollars for everyone?

FEHR: We've always believed that the industry is likely to grow best if we leave the clubs to engage in the kinds of entrepreneurial behavior that entrepreneurs do. Each one has got a local product. They're selling lots of games, and lots of games are on TV. Some are going to be better at it than others. No question about it. That's true in any industry in which people compete. It's also true that this isn't like McDonald's. Every McDonald's franchise can be successful every day, in theory. Half the baseball teams have to lose every day. And so, you've got that problem too.BA: You grew up in Kansas City. Is Kansas City a viable major league market? Can Kansas City be the next Seattle?

FEHR: I do not make predictions of that sort. I don't comment specifically about the fortunes of individual teams. All I can tell you is that I think Kansas City ought to be there. And there has been no suggestion recently that they're a contraction candidate under any scenario.

There are a couple of things which go into a club's operation. One is revenue, one is potential revenue, one is the operation and administration of the team. And we all have seen lots of teams that have a lot of assets, and they haven't used those assets all that well over the last 15 or 20 years. And we have all seen small-market clubs who seemingly do extremely well with low payrolls and low income. And that is something--those two phenomena are things we ought to pay attention to.

BA: Major League Baseball's claims of X number of teams losing X amount of dollars--what is the union's approach to those claims? Don't you guys have the right to audit those numbers?

FEHR: No. That's a complete myth. We have the right to certain information for purposes of revenue sharing. Revenue numbers. But we rely on the clubs for the most part to keep each other honest. We don't get cost information. We don't go in and audit the books of the clubs. We don't attempt to make judgments as to the real values of things, when you take into account related party transactions, or any of the rest of that kind of thing.

At the commissioner's testimony before Congress in December, of the claimed $500 million in losses, $500 million-plus, a very large segment was amortization--which most people consider not to be a bad thing. It is rather an affirmative tax benefit. The second thing was interest--and until you detail what the interest is for and how it's used, and take into account that that's a deduction too, or can be a deduction too, and it's impossible to quantify that, it's tough to know what it means. While he claimed more than a couple hundred million dollars in operating losses, in a $3.5 billion-plus industry, those operating losses were concentrated in big-market, high-revenue clubs that nobody thought were in trouble.

BA: The Dodgers, for instance.

FEHR: The Dodgers, for instance. And so, you know, that was the basis for contracting Minnesota and Montreal. To the extent we have specific information that's covered by confidentiality agreements, I'm not in a position to talk about it. But we have a situation in which we have to negotiate an agreement. The clubs have to operate under that agreement, and each club operates on its own. There will be, we know now, significant additional revenue sharing in this agreement. And hopefully between that and all these cyclical changes, and with an improved economy, things will begin to get better.

I will say that it is unusual, to say the least, to have an industry whose revenues in 1996 go from $1.775 billion to somewhere north of twice that in five years, when the union does not negotiate wages, and their response is to have continual claims to financial distress. It suggests that to the extent that there is a problem, it's not very much wage related.

They're worried about competition for players. It might tell you more about the circumstances clubs are in to watch what they do, not what they say. You've got to understand that major league clubs--and this is true in football, it's true in basketball, it's true in hockey, and it's true in baseball--they all have a built-in interest in portraying themselves as not doing very well. And the reason why is really pretty simple. If you want public concessions from stadiums, you need to do that. If you want concessions from players, you need to do that. We tend to pay a lot more attention to what people on an ongoing basis actually do. It is meaningful.

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BA: This is a quote from the 1986 Sporting News Guide recapping the '85 strike: "Both sides hired experts to analyze the club's data, and the discussion soon deteriorated into a dispute over whose accountants were right and which accounting methods were proper."

FEHR: Well, I don't want to characterize the dispute, but you could have all kinds of differing opinions as to the significance of certain facts, and as to what the remedy is, if there is a remedy there to be had. But that's not a terribly unusual thing to have happen.

BA: Speaking of history, what role does your prior experience with collusion play in your approach to bargaining today? You suggested eight or nine years ago that it had to color your feelings about the other side.

FEHR: That was a period of time in which the clubs just shut down the market, engaged in all kinds of outside-the-contract, inappropriate behavior, to violate their contractual obligation. We had bargained for a free market and were entitled to have it. What that tells us, not only from that experience but from the experience of things in other sports, is that you have a market out there. And the market operates under a set of conditions which you negotiate. And then some outside things happen. And what you're trying to do is, you're trying to predict how people are going to behave.

Now if you say, we're going to take a lot of money away from this team and give it to some other team, we think you can make predictions as to how people will behave in that circumstance, and what happens to the market. We think that when you add a luxury tax to that, and you add some other things to that, that you can predict pretty well. And so what the collusion does is it reinforces the notion that club behavior can be affected in very definite ways. And we are very conscious of that in bargaining.

Because in a very real sense, we cannot ever make a mistake. In a normal bargaining situation, in negotiating a three-year contract with the XYZ Company, at the end of that three years, if something didn't work out, most of the employees that were there to begin with are still going to be there, and you can go fix it for them. In baseball, we negotiate a five-year contract, and we come back, most of the players that are there on day one will not be there at the end of the contract. Which means if their opportunity has been lost or compromised in some way, you can't ever get it back. And that pressure, given the collusion experience, is very good.

BA: There are many owners, and many very influential owners--whether it's Bud Selig, Jerry Reinsdorf, George Steinbrenner, Bill Giles--who committed collusion, effectively sitting across the table from you still. Do you remember what they did?


FEHR: Of course you remember what they did, but you bargain with them anyway. You have a legal obligation to. We settled the cases 11 years ago, and you hope it's not going to happen again. But what you take out of it is that the free-agent market can be affected by all kinds of things. And you make darn sure that there is nothing in the agreement that you voluntarily agreed to which is going to take it down. And secondly, you do your best to make sure that there can't be anything done extralegally to take it down.

BA: Turning to the draft, apparently there is more agreement on that issue than perhaps others.

FEHR: We have come to an understanding that we're folding players into some sort of a draft that are now not covered by the draft. That's part one. And if we can get everything else agreed upon, we think that maybe we'll be able to agree to that. But there are a number of things we'd like the clubs to look at in that regard, and one of those is substantially cutting down the numbers of rounds. When you get to the point when you have players that have a value insignificant enough that they're not cost items to the clubs to any measurable degree--which is, at some level, far, far, far less than 38 rounds, which we're down to now--there is no longer any justification for not letting that kid look for a job with whatever organization he wants to look at. The clubs are terribly, terribly resistant to that idea. If they hold to that view, then this is going to be a difficult issue.

The second part of the draft is one that relates to the competitive-balance issues, for Kansas City and the other clubs that you were talking about. And this is very important. We believe that there are ways to be of great assistance to those clubs without somebody simply writing them a check. And the way you do that is you make players available to them. You do that by draft choices, including very high first-round draft choices. You do that by additional Rule 5 (draft) selections. You do that perhaps by a professional-player draft, where you can take somebody off someone's roster, and you give the recipient club the ability to trade or sell both the player and the picks. That is a very significant advantage for those clubs, and we think ought to be able to go a long, long way, in addition to some additional revenue sharing, to get us where we want to go. You're taking real hard assets away from the higher-income clubs, and you're depositing them at the clubs that are less well-situated.

BA: Would it be similar to the free-agent compensation pool draft that existed in '78 to '85, approximately? The Tim Belcher draft, if you will?

FEHR: You would allow a club that's less well-situated to take a player from a 40-man roster from a club that's more well-situated, allowing that club to freeze a certain number of players. We don't know exactly what that number would be. We'll see. But we think it can be very, very helpful.

BA: Let's jump to steroids. How would you assess any steroid use in the game?

FEHR: First of all, as I testified before the Congress, no one supports or condones the use of illegal substances or the illegal use of legal substances. That ought to go without question. Secondly, there are a number of substances, androstenedione being one, which may very well be steroids and are not illegal. The Congress of the United States and the Food and Drug Administration have seen fit to make those substances legal, such that they could be bought over the counter, in drug stores and in health food stores, without prescription--without even an age restriction. We have invited the Congress to look at that again. And if they conclude those substances are dangerous, regulate them. If they think they're dangerous to kids, prohibit their sale to kids.

BA: I'm not talking about andro. I'm talking about substances we already know are regulated and illegal, and that many players have alleged are being used to a not insignificant degree. No one knows the percentages, and no one knows whether the players making the assertions know for a fact of their use, or whether perhaps they're lumping in creatine and andro with what they call steroids. But at what point does the union's approach to the issue go from not condoning to acquiescing?

FEHR: If I were to be told that there were a lot of unlawful firearms in my hometown, I don't think I could be accused of acquiescing if I said that I still didn't think it was appropriate to bust into everybody's house without a warrant. A warrant requires a showing of cause related to an individual. Now, the constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure don't directly apply here. But we think there is something to the following notion: A, one ought not to make blanket accusations; B, if you're going to investigate someone, there is something to the notion that it ought to be based on reasonable cause to believe that that person is, or has been, doing something unlawful. That is a difference not between testing and no testing--it's a difference between mandatory testing of everybody, even those without suspicion, which would be the overwhelming majority, and for-cause testing, which would relate to specific individuals.


This is an issue which has been put on the table. We're discussing it with the players now. And it is an issue about which we will be negotiating over the next several weeks. I can't predict today what kind of an agreement is going to come out of that. I can suggest that it is often discussed as if it were a simplistic matter, and we do not treat it as a simplistic matter.

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BA: But allegations are being made, perhaps not by the particularly informed ones, but by players not named Caminiti or Canseco, that it is being used, and illegal activity is taking place on a significant level. This is activity that could be having a serious effect on the competition on the field. My point is that, if only for public-relations reasons, which is different from a libertarian approach, is there an approach to the issue in between the education that MLB and the union do and mandatory random testing?

FEHR: Sure. There are all kinds of programs, for lack of a better word, that one could envision which would get at this issue in different ways. There are combinations of approaches which may make sense. Indeed, the clubs' proposal has a combination approach--it has a random testing and it has a for-cause testing portion to it. What we have to do is try to figure out, as we look at this, what the appropriate mix is between education, for-cause type approaches, where there is an appropriate level of mandatory random testing, or whether it's not needed. I'm not going to prejudge the results of our internal deliberations, much less the discussions we'll eventually have with the clubs, or will continue with the clubs.

BA: While you were growing up in Kansas City, when you were 10 or 12, Vic Power was your favorite player. You loved how his home runs would break windows in the left-field parking lot. What would you have thought, back then, if you found out he was on steroids?

FEHR: Oh, I don't know what I would have thought. It's impossible for me to say . . . (Long pause.) . . . It's very difficult for me to put myself back into that time and place. If at any time it became known that somebody that I was a fan of was engaged in illegal activity, it would have been a real downer and a big disappointment. No question about it.

BA: We're 8-for-8 in having work stoppages taking place before new collective bargaining agreements get signed. Why should anyone believe we won't go 9-for-9?

FEHR: All streaks end, sooner or later. (Laughs.) Seriously, though, you've got to look at it a number of ways. First of all, well, history is not irrelevant. It clearly is relevant. And it does influence decisions you make.

In fact, each negotiation is different. And this negotiation in a number of respects is qualitatively different than some other ones we've had. Specifically, the industry is vastly larger than it once was. And secondly, we had a long strike the last time. And I think both of those things are factors which people are cognizant of.

Having said that, the players are in what I perceive to be a very difficult situation. The commissioner last spring made an announcement that there would be no lockout during the course of the major league season. That statement was interesting mostly for what it did not say: It did not say that immediately after the World Series ended, the clubs would continue business as usual, if there were no agreement. It conspicuously avoided that. And he has conspicuously avoided that commitment ever since.


And that makes sense, from the club standpoint, because if there is going to be a labor dispute in baseball, the clubs would like to pick the time, and the place, and the ground. That's during the offseason. They would like to replicate what they believe to be the successful strategy employed by the NBA the last time around. That strategy was, "As soon as the championship series is over, we lock the players out, we refuse to sign contracts, and we sweat them, and we threaten never to play basketball again--until they give us what we want." Why did they do that? Among other reasons, because the owners' revenue at the beginning of a season is significantly less than it is at midseason or at the end of the season.

So when we go in to bargain here, we are faced with what amounts to the assumption, absent an agreement by the clubs otherwise, that if the rest of the season is played, and the World Series ends, and there is no agreement, the clubs will lock out. They will refuse to sign players. They will consider a unilateral imposition of terms. And they will dare the players to go on strike in spring training or at the beginning of the season at the period of time most economically advantageous to the clubs and least to the players.

Now, nobody wants a strike. Nobody wants a lockout, at least on the players' side. You do everything you reasonably can to avoid it. But nobody can reasonably ask the players to bargain pretending that what happened in the NBA last time didn't happen. Or pretending that the clubs' rights after the end of the season wouldn't be what I've just described. Or forgetting that they tried to unilaterally implement in '94-'95. Those are realities we have to deal with.

That difficulty is further strengthened by the fact that while we haven't seen the documents--clubs don't give this as part of the contracts--we believe that the agreement with Fox requires Fox to pay Major League Baseball anyway, if the World Series is not played as a result of a strike. In other words, they negotiated with Fox for what amounts to interim financing over the winter if they don't get a deal with the players. So we have to look at that too. And that forces us to look at dates. Or that forces us to look at circumstances which take all of that into account.

I can't tell you whether this is going to be done without a stoppage. I can tell you that is our most fervent goal. But we sort of feel like, given the circumstances we're in, that we're behind the 8-ball a little bit. That's a reality we have to deal with.

BA: In '81, I believe the June 12 strike date was set by a court in some way, that you had to do it by such-and-such date or you couldn't do it at all. August 6, 1985; August 12, 1994. What goes into the setting of a strike date?

FEHR: First of all, you don't set a strike date unless you believe that you have no other reasonable option, and that doing so will be a spur to reach an agreement. Sometimes in collective bargaining as well as other things, deadlines are helpful. Sometimes they're not; we learned that last time. But sometimes they are.

Then what you do is, you try to make a judgment as to what combinations of proposals, and deadlines if you have to set them, are likely to produce an agreement. It's really difficult to go into it more specifically than that, and we're . . . for reasons of confidentiality, that I owe my membership, I really don't want to go into it more.

The object is to reach an agreement without having to get that far. If, God forbid, we get into that situation where there's a lockout or there's a strike, you hope that it's settled on day one; if not day one, then on day two.

BA: Sometimes it has been. It's not always 50 or 250 days.

FEHR: Yeah, sometimes it has. I mean, in 1980, which was my first round of bargaining, it was settled at the wire. In 1985 it was one day. In 1990 it was a club lockout, but we were able to make up all the games. So we have examples of both. But the reason people think about it is that they remember the last one. The last one was a big one.

BA: Given the fact that the last one was a big one, will that be a deterrent on both sides to having it happen again? Or is the fact that baseball came back from it show that the industry can withstand another?

FEHR: Baseball is a great game. I think it's going to have fan appeal for as long as anybody wants to play it. We did benefit from a real hot economy during the years after the strike, too. All I can say is this: From the players' standpoint, and I hope from the owners' standpoint, nobody wants a strike. Nobody wants a lockout. Everybody wants an agreement. We want to find a way through this. You don't consider those options unless you feel that you have to. And our history suggests that we have to, on both sides. It would be nice if this time were different. We'll find out.