Indiana Alumni Magazine

Fehr Factor

Baseball’s union leader has been called intractable, cranky, brusque, intimidating, ruthless, dedicated, brilliant, analytical, and articulate, but one description stands out: undefeated.

By Mike Wright

In a world in which cell phones were still relatively rare, Fehr prepares for deadline-day negotiations during the 1994 baseball strike. ON THE LINE — In a world in which cell phones were still relatively rare, Fehr prepares for deadline-day negotiations during the 1994 baseball strike. AP/Wide World Photos.

Just three years out of law school, a young Kansas City, Kan., attorney with Hoosier roots took on the task of representing the Major League Baseball Players' Association in a case involving baseball's reserve clause, the century-old contract stipulation that bound a player to one team.

Donald M. Fehr, BA'70, worked for the firm hired by the players' union to represent it in an appeal by the owners after pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally won an arbitration ruling in 1975 against the reserve clause.

When a federal judge upheld the ruling, the age of free agency, and Fehr's career in baseball, dawned. Fehr has been playing hardball with the owners ever since, becoming general counsel for the players' union in 1977 and succeeding his baseball mentor, MLBPA Executive Director Marvin Miller, in 1983. Fehr is acknowledged as one of the most successful labor negotiators this country has ever seen.

Fehr says his initial connection to baseball was serendipitous, but he was ready to take full advantage.

"Opportunities don't come up in your life all that often," he said during a lecture at IU Bloomington on April 19. "You have to be prepared to take advantage of the ones that come your way."

Fehr was born in Marion, Ind., but his family moved to the Kansas City area when he was about 6 or 7 years old. His father attended IU before World War II, but finished elsewhere after his service. When it came time for Donald to go to college, his dad recommended IU.

"I came here, took a look at it, and felt it was the place to be," Fehr recalls.

As a student on the Bloomington campus from 1966 to 1970, Fehr majored in political science and joined Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity. He was on the debate team for a year or two, spent a lot of time in the billiard hall at the Indiana Memorial Union, and enjoyed his undergraduate experience despite the "supercharged" atmosphere brought on by the Vietnam War.

"What I didn't forget, but it sort of went out of my mind for a while, is what a warm, wonderful, soft place this area is," he says. "You miss that when you haven't had it for a while."

After graduating from IU, Fehr went on to law school at the University of Missouri. He clerked for a federal judge, then joined a law firm that represented a steelworkers' union. In 1976, at age 28, Fehr took on the Messersmith/McNally case, which led to his career in baseball. He has maintained what has been described as the nation's strongest labor organization.

The union, under Fehr's guidance, has won every major labor dispute in his 20-plus years on the job.

The strike cost the players, owners, major-league cities, and TV networks millions of dollars. Baseball also lost some good will, and attendance was slow to return. The 1998 home-run race between Sammy Sosa of the Cubs and Mark McGwire of the Cardinals, however, sparked a renewed interest in the game.

Despite concerns that free agency, multi-million-dollar player contracts, and seemingly endless labor disputes would ruin baseball, America's pastime seems as strong as ever. Major League Baseball reported record attendance figures through the first two weeks of the 2004 season, averaging 31,223 fans per game. After the 1994-95 strike, attendance grew to a high of 72.6 million in 2001 before leveling off at about 67.5 million the last two years.

Meanwhile, 2003 team payrolls ranged from $19.6 million for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to $152.8 million for the New York Yankees. That disparity concerns owners and fans, who claim the richest teams dominate by buying the best players. But that doesn't always prove true. It was the Florida Marlins, 25th in baseball with a payroll of $48.8 million, that won the 2003 World Series.

Through all the labor turmoil, Fehr has been the constant for the players' union.

As a result of collective bargaining and court victories, and in conjunction with lucrative media-rights deals, even the beginning Major League Baseball player earns far more than the average American. The superstars are wealthy beyond most people's dreams. In 2004 the minimum salary for a Major League Baseball player is $300,000. The highestpaid player is Alex Rodriguez, now of the New York Yankees, who signed a 10-year, $252 million free-agent contract with the Texas Rangers after the 2000 season.

"What I do in representing the players is attempt to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement," Fehr says.

Fehr points out that when he began working with Major League Baseball in 1977, total income across all 26 teams was something less than $300 million. By 1990 income had reached $1.3 billion and 10 years later it was up to $3.3 billion. The revenue, he says, is what drives individual player salaries.

But with the increased revenue and profits come celebrity. And with celebrity comes vastly increased public scrutiny, Fehr says, guided by the notion that professional team sports are different from the rest of society and operate on a different set of rules and expectations.

He cites concepts like the draft, trades, and free agency in professional sports. He described baseball trades in terms of academe to illustrate the point that baseball is viewed as different.

"What do you suppose your reaction would be if the dean told a biology professor he had traded him to the University of Mississippi for a computer researcher and two draft picks?" Fehr asked. "The first reaction would be to laugh, and second we would say, 'He can't do that.'

"As a matter of fact, if all the universities got together and required all faculty to sign agreements that said they could be involuntarily transferred at the decision of the university, and if they didn't go to the other university, they couldn't ever teach again, you would have agreements that replicate the trade agreements in professional sports."

Often, if a baseball player says he doesn't want to be traded, the reaction from the public and the press is that the player is a spoiled brat, Fehr says.

"Why do we view it that way?" he says. "Why do we say it's OK for professional sports to have special rules? We don't even ask the question. Most fans and reporters say the guys get paid a lot of money, so it's OK. We don't do that to power lawyers, doctors, managers, entertainers, or any other profession except public employees. There we do it because we say we don't want to raise taxes."

Last year Fehr chaired a U.S. Senate-appointed commission to restructure the U.S. Olympic Committee, a group that the commission’s report labeled 'a constant source of embarrassment to the American public.' OLYMPIC CONTENDER — Last year Fehr chaired a U.S. Senate-appointed commission to restructure the U.S. Olympic Committee, a group that the commission’s report labeled “a constant source of embarrassment to the American public.” AP/Wide World Photos.

The widespread belief that professional sports are, or should be, considered different leads Fehr to a critical issue: performance-enhancing drugs. Fehr, fans, and players agree that the use of unlawful performance-enhancing substances is wrong and should not be tolerated. The debate, Fehr says, centers on whether drug testing is an appropriate means for reaching this shared objective.

"The common argument you hear now is simply this: Performance-enhancing substances are bad, harmful, so we want to test all athletes all the time for everything we can think of," Fehr says. "We won't require any individualized evidence that the individual we want to test has done anything wrong, and that if the individual resists the notion that he should prove himself innocent of something of which he is not suspected, that will be considered evidence of guilt.

"I say those issues, phrased that way, raise more profound questions than something simply related to sports. In this country, we believe people are entitled to privacy, and we should not invade that zone of privacy without a substantial reason related to that individual. Is being an athlete a good enough reason?"

Baseball's basic agreement of 2002 bans unlawful anabolic steroids and provides for "reasonable-cause" testing. The pact also agreed to an unannounced, but anonymous, testing of all players, some of them twice. If more than 5 percent of the tests came back positive, the Players' Association would begin and continue testing all players until the number of positive tests fell below 2.5 percent over two consecutive years.

The tests did come back just in excess of 5 percent in 2003, Fehr says, and all players are now subject to testing.

That's not satisfactory to many fans or to federal lawmakers, however. During a congressional hearing in March, several U.S. senators called for more stringent drug testing in baseball. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told Fehr that if baseball didn't act, Congress would.

"Your failure to commit to addressing this issue straight on and immediately will motivate this committee to search for legislative remedies," the Associated Press reported McCain as saying.

But Fehr reiterates the point that society seems entirely comfortable saying that employment and business relations in sports may operate on a fundamentally different set of rules. That precept, he suggests, could be a dangerous thing.

"Consider that there is a record of every telephone call you make, of every e-mail sent, of every Web site you visit, and if you have a credit card, there's a record of every purchase you make," he says.

"As we adapt to this changing world, perhaps we should be more, rather than less, vigilant to protect whatever society desires as our core zone of privacy. The notion that if you are not guilty you have nothing to hide perhaps is just as wrongheaded now as it was 50 or 100 years ago.

"What we accept one day in sports, because sports are 'different,' because they are a bunch of overpaid spoiled brats, makes it that much easier to apply the same things to the rest of the world in five, 10, 15, or 20 years. And that means we need to think about it a lot."

A lifelong baseball fan, Mike Wright, BA’78, is managing editor of the Indiana Alumni Magazine. Wright can be reached at miwrightatindiana.edu.

 

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