Fehr Ball or Foul? : Players’ Union Executive Head Stays Within Strict Guidelines When Forced to Deal With Baseball’s Intransigent Owners

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. —  It is late in spring training, and the man often characterized as the most powerful in baseball has the top down on his rental car, soaking up the Arizona rays as he marvels at the growth and development he sees when returning to the Valley of the Sun each spring.

It is growth similar to that of the Major League Baseball Players Assn. since Don Fehr became executive director in 1983, a span during which he has had to ward off repeated attempts by the owners to reduce and restrict player rights through collective bargaining and collusion.

Fehr is now girding for another bargaining battle. The owners want to impose a salary cap that the union is unlikely to approve, and Fehr recently wound up a 32-day tour of the spring camps in which he reviewed for the players a history of troubled negotiations with the owners, urged the need for solidarity and discussed the possibility of a strike in September, or as early as the All-Star break, if there is no settlement.

The last month of the regular season represents the last leverage for the union before the start of the expanded playoffs and World Series.

“A strike is the last resort, but it’s hard to envision going into the off-season without protection against a declaration of impasse by the owners and the unilateral imposition of a new (economic) system,” Fehr said.

“That would be an absolute conflagration, but it may be what the owners want. We’ve heard rumors that some owners want to shut down the industry for a year and a half or more. How’s that for acting in the fans’ best interest?

“I mean, that kind of talk is not about money but control, and I think that’s what this is all about--establishing who’s in charge. Funny, I always thought that the owners’ primary interest was winning baseball games.”

Funny? No one has ever accused Fehr of being funny, at least not in public.

Bland? To a degree. Blunt? To a larger degree.

His is a humor wrapped in irony and acerbic wit. His is a skepticism born in the delusional decade of the ‘60s and hardened by too many battles with management.

Antisocial and reclusive, as portrayed in a national magazine? Not entirely.

Articulate and well-read? Definitely.

The most powerful man in baseball? “I don’t know what that means,” Fehr said. “I don’t own anything. I’m not involved in the management of any clubs.

“Where that comes from, I guess, is that the players have rights and I’m the person who stands up for those rights and says no to certain things.

“Since there’s no commissioner, the owners appear drifting and diffused, but the players don’t. The players always present a united front. I’m the players’ spokesman, so I appear to have more power than I do. That’s where it comes from, but I don’t take it seriously. I don’t have much desire for publicity and notoriety. I know it’s important for me to be recognized to the extent that I’m considered authoritative when speaking on the players’ behalf, but the rest of it is nonsense. I’ll be happy when I can slip into obscurity.”

*

The man who would choose obscurity finds his recreation in reading. Haunting bookstores, he says, is the best part of his spring tour.

Fehr read the World Book Encyclopedia before he was 12, he said. He estimates that he reads 120 books a year, down from 150 because the demands of a job that requires more than 55 hours a week have become too great. Among the books in his Arizona hotel room are a science-fiction novel, a biography of the Roman emperor, Augustus, and a study of chaos and complexity theory, which could easily be a history of owner-player relations.

Mathematics. Music. Physics. Fehr has never met a subject that didn’t interest him.

“Be it reading or debating, Don has always been interested in how the world works,” his brother, Steve, a Kansas City attorney and player agent, said.

Said Fehr: “Interesting stuff if you’re a weird person, I guess.”

Weird? A touch of self-deprecating humor.

This much is certain: Fehr isn’t into what he calls “meet and greet” social functions. It’s only important, he said, that he knows his constituency.

“Given my scintillating personality, it’s a good thing I don’t have to win the public relations battle,” he said. “I’m often accused of being too blunt for that.

“I’ve just never enjoyed social bantering for the sake of social bantering. I’d much prefer reading, spending time with my family or playing an instrument.

“I mean, I’m not easily given to broad smiles or ingratiating demeanor, but I don’t think I’m reclusive. At least, I hope not.”

A younger brother, Jerry, was a professional musician before going into wholesale jewelry. Fehr plays guitar a little and finds therapy, he said, in a digital piano that allows him to put on headphones and not disturb anyone in his Ryebrook, N.Y., home, where he lives with his wife, Stephanie, and his four children--David, 19, a Kansas freshman; Mark, 15; Rachel, 11, and Elyse, 6.

The children, Stephanie said by phone, have been born amid several baseball crises. Mark, for instance, arrived during the 1981 players’ strike. His father was gone for three months. Similarly, Fehr estimates that he has been home for only two or three of his and Stephanie’s 23 wedding anniversaries. The 23rd was two weeks ago, and they were apart again.

No wonder Fehr would prefer spending those rare free hours at home.

“Don invests so much time in his job that people only see him in that context,” Stephanie said. “He may appear reclusive and antisocial because of it, but that’s not accurate. Don doesn’t socialize with athletes or people in baseball, but we have many friends in a variety of jobs.

“He also believes that trust is vital to a relationship, so it takes him longer to develop one. He’s definitely not a social animal, but he doesn’t have the time for it even if he wanted to be. His priority is to his job and family, and around us he tells jokes, teases and reacts well to practical jokes. But not at work. People seldom see that side of him at work.”

Steve Fehr has encouraged his brother to develop a public sense of humor, providing him with jokes that elicit only a quizzical expression from Don.

“From a public standpoint, Don just isn’t into the social BS,” Steve Fehr said. “He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Never has, never will.”

Said Steve Greenberg, the former deputy commissioner who has also worked with Fehr as an attorney-agent: “I don’t think anyone would suggest that Don has a lot of charisma. He’ll never make it in the Catskills as a stand-up comic, but that’s not a criticism. It’s just the way he is. He’s also very thorough, analytical and intelligent.

“I’d say his greatest strength as head of the union is his consistency. He avoids getting tripped up or undercutting himself in his message, and that takes a lot of discipline. People with a large constituency often get in trouble changing their message to suit the purpose of the person they’re talking to, but Don doesn’t do that. He’s articulate, straightforward and well principled.

“I didn’t always like his principles when I was in the commissioner’s office, but they were always well reasoned and consistent.”

At 45, Fehr has been with the players’ union as general counsel and executive director since 1977. His 17 years are one more than the tenure of the legendary Marvin Miller, credited with building the union into one of the nation’s strongest. An obviously tough act to follow.

“Not only has Don done it, but he’s been widely praised in the process,” associate general counsel Gene Orza said.

Spurred by free agency, arbitration and the owners’ tendency to spend their national TV money as soon as they got it, the average major league salary has risen from $72,000 in 1977 to more than $1 million. The union’s licensing revenue has risen from $2 million a year in 1981 to more than $70 million.

Among his many arbitration victories, Fehr gained a favorable verdict when management tried to impose mandatory drug testing, and his long fight against collusion resulted in a $280-million settlement--before interest--now being distributed to the victimized players.

“By and large, we stopped a really bad thing,” he said of collusion. “If you can’t have satisfaction over that, you can’t have satisfaction over anything. If there wasn’t a residual satisfaction to the job, I wouldn’t do it. We put a lot of pride into our work and feel pretty good about the results.”

Fehr grew up in the Kansas City suburb of Prairie Village, Kan. He played Little League but was never obsessed with the game.

“I was distressed when Charlie Finley took the A’s to Oakland, but not to the point that I couldn’t find something else to listen to on the radio,” he said. “I haven’t been to a football game since 1972. I’ve never been competitive over things I don’t consider important.

“The job, of course, has allowed me to develop an appreciation for the complexities of the game and the skill level needed to stay at the major league level, but I spend so much time dealing with the day-to-day problems that I just want to go home at night. I hesitate to go to the park much because it reminds me of work.

“It’s also difficult for me to be a fan because I’m involved with so many baseball people that I have to give up my rooting interest, and that takes a lot of the edge off. One of these years I’ll be able to spend a summer at the park and enjoy it.”

Thus, although Fehr understands the importance of maintaining the romanticist’s view as part of baseball’s appeal, he cannot succumb to it.

“I’m not dealing with something abstract, a piece of art,” he said. “I’m dealing with people’s careers and futures, and that’s complicated by the fact that they have only a limited time to make an appreciable amount of money. I can’t afford to be a romanticist about it.”

Much of his approach was shaped as a liberal-activist during the 1960s, when he attended Indiana University and later worked on the George McGovern campaign while attending the Missouri Kansas City law school. That was the decade of the King and Kennedy assassinations, the Kent State tragedy, the division over Vietnam.

Fehr said he saw the country polarized, unable to compromise and that he developed considerable respect for the individual and considerable skepticism in regard to the nature and motives of “monopolies and big business.”

The impressions lingered, though it was fate that put him in position to exercise the skepticism as an officer of the players’ union. His goal was to be a judge, and his first job out of law school was as a clerk for U.S. District Judge Elmo Hunter in Kansas City. He and Hunter still talk and exchange opinions, and Fehr still feels a tug when he thinks about how daily lives are affected in federal court.

Then and now he was also attracted to the challenge of trial law, and he went on to work for a Kansas City firm specializing in labor law. That firm was hired by the players’ union in 1976 to handle the appeal of Andy Messersmith’s free-agency case.

Messersmith, a pitcher with the Dodgers at the time, played the 1975 season without a contract to challenge the reserve clause in the standard contract. Arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled in Messersmith’s favor, making him a free agent, and the owners appealed. As the local counsel working with Richard Moss, then general counsel of the union, Fehr helped sustain the historic ruling.

“If that isn’t the most famous case in baseball history it ought to be,” Fehr said. “It enabled the players to achieve their market value, and it forced the owners to negotiate overdue changes in the reserve system.”

Impressed by Fehr’s work on the case, Miller asked him to become general counsel of the union in 1977, when Moss left to become a player agent. Miller retired in December 1982, and Kenneth Moffett, a former federal mediator, was hired to replace him. Moffett was fired 15 months later, however, for taking positions that the players believed were too conciliatory, and Fehr soon became executive director.

“With the players of that era, there was always pressure to stand as tall as Marvin, but I never regarded it as a burden,” Fehr said. “Marvin had a deserved reputation, and I never hesitated to seek his advice or keep him informed, particularly in the negotiations of 1985. I also asked Marvin to speak to the players who were in New York during the negotiations of 1990 on the historical perspective and importance of remaining unified.

“I’ve never agreed with everything Marvin says, but I still talk to him regularly, and of course, the players’ perspective has changed with time. Most of the younger players don’t know Marvin and aren’t familiar with his accomplishments. It’s valuable to educate them as to what he did.”

Fehr continues to follow many of Miller’s negotiating precepts--Don’t make proposals you intend to withdraw; don’t say what you don’t mean; make sure you do what your constituents want you to do because it’s their future. Fehr said he can’t allow himself to be influenced by public perceptions of player greed, nor does he believe that the style of the negotiators matters.

“The skill matters but not the style,” he said. “Negotiations are driven by the desires of the constituency.”

Reached at his New York apartment, Miller said he has seen Fehr mature in his job.

“His dealing with problems, and his approaches to problems are all on the plus side,” Miller said. “His handling of collusion was extremely important. On the one hand, he had to deal with the perjury of the owners. On the other, he had the frustration and anger of the players. It took time and skill to work that out, and he was up to it.”

Miller also said he thought the union is as strong as ever “but that doesn’t cut ice” unless it continues to meet the challenge of owners who, every three or four years, “so under-assess the players that they think they can get away with anything.” The salary cap, Miller said, is the latest “outrageous example.”

“Here you have the anomaly of the owners asking a union whose purpose is to improve the wages of its constituents to join them in a conspiracy to hold down those wages,” Miller said. “That’s exactly what a salary cap is, an instrument for holding down wages. I’m sure the players will meet the challenge again.”

*

It is against this backdrop of another potentially bitter labor dispute that the 1994 season has begun.

The last seven bargaining negotiations have ended in either lockout or strike. Given that history and the memory of collusion, Fehr said, the union approaches the new talks with skepticism that is “a never-ending drumbeat.”

He said each situation is viewed on its own but added: “I don’t minimize the difficulty or likelihood” of the union’s approving a salary cap that would limit wages, make it difficult for teams to improve and significantly modify free agency and arbitration.

Fehr asks familiar questions: How can an industry with revenues of $1.7 billion be in financial trouble? Why do the owners keep talking about a partnership with the players if the players are never consulted on major decisions? Why hasn’t the union received a proposal more than 15 months after the owners voted to reopen negotiations? Why did the owners agree with negotiator Richard Ravitch’s demand that they not join him at the table?

“That’s disquieting,” Fehr said. “If this is so important to the industry, shouldn’t they want to participate? The lack of owner involvement means they don’t want to hear for themselves. Ravitch even passed a rule to keep them out. What does he want to keep them from knowing?”

Fehr said Ravitch has been treating the owners’ position with the secrecy of the Manhattan Project.

“For a year and a half, he’s been telling us that he would explain the details of their revenue-sharing formula when it was passed, and now he says it’s none of our business,” Fehr said. “I mean, the only thing he’s really told us is they need a new system because they can’t afford another San Diego (referring to owner Tom Werner’s alleged need to break up his team for financial reasons).

“I wanted to say, ‘Wait, we didn’t pick the owner and we didn’t pick the management.’ Did any owners step in to help that situation or stop it? Clearly, it wasn’t important enough for the owners to do something about, but they want the players’ help in trying to prevent it. Maybe we should just buy the Padres and take it (the club) off their hands. Do you think they’d sell it to us?”

Fehr shook his head and said he is troubled by the apparent lack of direction, the appearance of an industry adrift, the absence of a commissioner or chief executive officer around whom policy and planning revolves and who serves as a public relations focal point.

Referring to interim commissioner Bud Selig’s attempt to govern by committee, Fehr said, “There’s a saying that a committee that designs racehorses comes out with camels.”

Despite the troubled relationship between owners and players and the likelihood it will not improve this year, Fehr said the product itself is too good not to survive and that he has no timetable for leaving his job. He is hopeful, he said, of helping professional baseball expand internationally and looks forward to an Olympic tournament, possibly even in Sydney in 2000, in which the majority of players are major leaguers representing their own countries. He is also hopeful of restructuring the amateur draft.

“Too much money is being wasted in the minor leagues,” he said. “We should be pushing kids to college, subsidizing those programs and allowing them to play in professional summer leagues while they’re still in school, the way an acting student is allowed to take roles in summer stock.”