Ian Happ, Two Other Players Not Returning to MLBPA’s Executive Subcommittee Following Spring Mutiny
I have a feeling this is only mildly interesting to a small subset of readers, and most of that is only because Ian Happ is named, so I’ll keep this brief. Back in March, there was a short but significant mutiny within the Major League Baseball Players Association’s ranks as a small group of players sought to remove deputy director Bruce Meyer from his role. This came despite Meyer’s oversight of a collective bargaining process that resulted in what is broadly thought to be a better deal for players than the last two.
“There are still a lot of players with a lot of questions and lots of anger,” one player agent told Evan Drellich of The Athletic. “Remember, we’re talking about baseball players, so it’s not necessarily rational.”
At the center of this kerfuffle was Harry Marino, a lawyer who helped organize minor leaguers in their successful bid to win union representation. Though Marino was later rebuked in a statement from a group of players, the ripple effects were felt in a recent election during the union’s annual meetings in Scottsdale. That includes the departure of Happ, Lucas Giolito, and Jack Flaherty from MLBPA’s executive subcommittee.
That’s the same eight-player group that put out the statement chastising Marino, even though three members had apparently been on his side at one point. Flaherty expressed regret over his role in the whole mess, which only lasted a week or two. As to whether this is a matter of their peers no longer trusting them or the players in question realizing that they don’t want to participate directly in the messy politics of the union, we may never know.
The biggest issue here is the unionization of minor leaguers, an effort spearheaded by Marino, and the result it’s had on the union structure. Not only did the MLBPA’s ranks roughly quintuple from 1,200 to over 6,000 members, but those minor leaguers were granted almost as much power as their big league counterparts. That alone is enough to cause some unrest, then you get a brash young lawyer stirring the pot and things tend to get a little testy.
This isn’t something most fans will notice in the least for the next year, but the current CBA expires at the conclusion of the 2026 season and we’re going to start hearing about negotiations well before that point. Given the contentious nature of the last few agreements, not to mention all the haggling over MLB’s post-pandemic return, we could be in for another protracted battle.