NEW YORK, Aug. 29

– The Major League Baseball Players Association has launched a campaign to unionize Minor League Players across the country. The historic effort kicked off Sunday night after receiving overwhelming support from the MLBPA’s Executive Board.

“Minor Leaguers represent our game’s future and deserve wages and working conditions that befit elite athletes who entertain millions of baseball fans nationwide,” MLBPA Executive Director Tony Clark said. “They’re an important part of our fraternity and we want to help them achieve their goals both on and off the field.”

The campaign is supported by Advocates for Minor Leaguers, which has served as a voice and resource for players since 2020, bringing heightened attention to the substandard working conditions that exist throughout the Minor Leagues. Each member of the Advocates for Minor Leaguers staff has resigned to take on a new role working for the MLBPA.

“This generation of Minor League Players has demonstrated an unprecedented ability to address workplace issues with a collective voice,” said Harry Marino, outgoing Executive Director of Advocates for Minor Leaguers. “Joining with the most powerful union in professional sports assures that this voice is heard where it matters most – at the bargaining table.” “This organizing campaign is an investment in the future of our game and our Player fraternity,” Clark said.

July 17, 2022

On the eve of Major League Baseball’s 92nd midsummer classic, the All Star Game, my wife and I created and hosted an most exquisite off field event to kick off the 2022 All Star Weekend.  We teamed up to create “Evening of Champions”, a VIP, Invitation only, star-studded, red-carpet event for the icons, legends and luminaries of sports, business, entertainment and culture to celebrate All Star Game week.  The luxurious Maybourne Hotel in Beverly Hills was the venue for this championship affair.  The food, drinks, decor, music and guest list reflected and highlighted Los Angeles with its legendary culture of achievement, winning, career dreams, aspirations and successes.

It was magical evening, a celebration of friendships, relationships, gratitude and the fun around the All Star game that they are so familiar with. 

I was an All Star twelve times” “Los Angeles is the perfect place o bring together the champions of sports, business and entertainment, for an evening to remember. We thought this was a great way to highlight the midsummer classic and we did just that”

Celebrities included Earvin Magic Johnson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Cal Ripken Jr, Derek Jeter, Barry Bonds, etc., along with television, movie stars, Cedric the Entertainer, L.L. Cool J, Smokey Robinson Anthony Anderson and Shannon Sharpe were in attendance. We stepped up to the plate and hit the pitch out of the park with “Evening of Champions”.  This VIP affair in the City of Angels may very well have catapulted MLB All Star Game festivities to a new level.

Dave Winfield and Ken Griffey Jr. will be among the advisers for a permanent exhibit that re-examines the contributions of Jackie Robinson and others.

On Baseball | Jackie Robinson Day

Jackie Robinson lived only a decade as a Hall of Famer. He suffered from diabetes and died of a heart attack at age 53, in 1972. Robinson had integrated the major leagues a quarter-century before, and he never stopped striving for social justice.

“I marvel at how much this man did in such a short period of time,” said Doug Glanville, a former major league outfielder and an ESPN analyst, who gave his son the middle name Robinson. “He lived, like, five lifetimes. He was in his 50s when he passed away, and you sit there and go, ‘How in the world did he do all this? How did he take all this on?’”

Glanville teaches a class on sports and society at the University of Connecticut and assigns students a letter Robinson wrote to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in 1960, urging King to help quell the infighting between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the N.A.A.C.P. Robinson co-founded a Black-owned bank in Harlem, served as a columnist for New York newspapers and wrote in his autobiography that he could not stand and sing the national anthem.

His contributions, in other words, went much deeper than suiting up for the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947. As Major League Baseball celebrates the 75th anniversary of Robinson’s debut, his legacy is getting a thorough re-examination at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

The Hall will announce on Friday that it has begun a two-year project to create a permanent exhibit on Black baseball. This will replace the current one — Ideals and Injustices — which was installed in 1997 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s debut.

“We know that there’s a greater depth to these stories that probably wasn’t told in the past, including more Black perspectives and interpretations,” said Josh Rawitch, the president of the Hall of Fame.

“If you think about the research that’s been done and the way that society now understands the racism that existed both before and since Jackie Robinson, those are all really important things that in some ways are tackled in the current exhibit but in other ways probably not done to the extent that they can be.”

The advisory board for the project will include several former players — Glanville, Adam Jones, Dave Stewart and the Hall of Famers Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Larkin and Dave Winfield — as well as historians and representatives from the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., and the Players Alliance, a nonprofit made up of current and former players. Rawitch has also spoken with current players, like Dee Strange-Gordon of the Washington Nationals, who could be involved.

The Hall — located in a mostly white community and with a mostly white staff — has also created a new, full-time position for someone to help coordinate the project from a different perspective.

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“We have to be able to tell the story authentically,” Rawitch said. “So, with that, we are searching for a curator who’s lived the experience either through their race, through their studies or through their understanding of what it was like to experience what these players experienced.”

Winfield pointed out that the Hall of Fame had inducted many more Black players and officials since 1997 — more than three dozen, including pioneers like Bud Fowler, Minnie Miñoso and Buck O’Neil in this year’s class — and said it was time for a fresh look.

“The biggest thing is that so much more history has been researched, revealed, unearthed — and this is American history,” Winfield said. “Of course it’s baseball history, but baseball is an integral part of America. You hear many times now that people are trying to erase or whitewash history, and that’s not good. It’s very important that worthy people can take their place and be recognized.”

M.L.B. officially recognized the Negro leagues as major leagues in late 2020, and the Hall has grappled with how to acknowledge the efforts by some of its inductees to uphold the color line. It has kept up all of the plaques, choosing context over erasure: A sign near the gallery entryway now reminds visitors that “enshrinement reflects the perspective of the voters at the time of election.” The museum and the library, the sign adds, provide deeper analysis — the shining and the shameful — of the inductees’ careers.

Such accounting will be essential to the new exhibit, and with more than 150 years of history to review it is a massive undertaking. Glanville said he preferred the term exploratory to advisory, because there is so much still to learn about the Black experience in baseball, so much that continues to evolve.

“There’s still a common thread, even in 2022,” Glanville said. “Pioneering efforts, whether it’s Ketanji Jackson, whatever — there’s a lot of barbed wire, there’s a lot of pain, there’s a lot of familiarity to some of the hurdles that Robinson faced.

“And at the same time, there’s a lot to celebrate, a lot of hope. Because when you are a first and you are opening certain doors, you see possibilities. You see the chance to bring everybody with you through the best of what we profess to celebrate — at least foundationally — of equality and what our country was founded on.”

Rawitch said the exhibit would have a digital and traveling component for those who cannot get to Cooperstown. It will highlight not just hardship, as Glanville suggested, but also the ways that the Black experience has enriched and enlivened baseball — a useful reminder as the sport seeks to increase Black participation numbers in the majors that have fallen sharply since their peak in the 1980s.

That was Winfield’s prime, and he said he hopes the display will feature video of stars like Griffey and Bo Jackson — and, yes, himself — climbing walls that seemed unscalable, of Rickey Henderson stealing bases at rates unheard-of today, of Dave Parker rounding the bases with a flair all his own.

“Speed, style, power — just a unique style of play,” Winfield said. “You tell people what a lot of these players accomplished, it’s almost incomprehensible.”

That is the Hall of Fame’s mission, reflected again in its newest project: to make the incomprehensible come to life, to contextualize and glorify the game-changers. Jackie Robinson is just one of many.

“Bud Fowler overcame numerous obstacles to become one of the most significant players in baseball history. In addition to being the first African American to play professional baseball, he was one of the game’s great promoters and developers—and everything he did in baseball came against the pushback of the presence of a Black man on the field. All this makes him an important barrier breaker, a notable figure in the history of our game, and a worthy recipient of this recognition. It will be my honor to speak for Bud Fowler during the Induction Ceremony on July 24.”

NEW YORK, March 10

The Major League Baseball Players Association today reached agreement with Major League Baseball on a new, five-year collective bargaining agreement.

Withstanding a 99-day lockout by owners, Players negotiated a new CBA that enhances competition on and off the field, ensures first-class medical and pension benefits for Players and their families, institutes unprecedented contractual enhancements that will apply throughout the Association’s membership, and provides fairer wages to Players at all points of their careers.

“Our union endured the second-longest work stoppage in its history to achieve significant progress in key areas that will improve not just current players’ rights and benefits, but those of generations to come,” Executive Director Tony Clark said. “Players remained engaged and unified from beginning to end, and in the process reenergized our fraternity.”

Among the key components of the 2022-2027 Basic Agreement:

• Significant increases to minimum salaries
• Institution of a new, $50M bonus pool that will reward the achievements of Players who have not yet reached salary arbitration eligibility
• Significant increases to the payroll thresholds applicable under the Competitive Balance Tax
• Amendments to the Rule 4 Draft Order designed to deter tanking
• Draft pick incentives for Clubs who promote top prospects and avoid service time manipulation
• Pension benefits will continue as the best allowed by law
• Best-in-class medical benefits for Players and their families
• Improved benefits for former Players
• Expanded post-season (12-teams)
• A limit on the number of times a Player can be optionally assigned to the minors in a single season
• Increased spending pools in the Rule 4 draft
• A voluntary scouting combine for amateur prospects
• A new policy governing commercial arrangements with sports betting companies
• Enhanced revenue streams through jersey and helmet sponsorship agreements
• Service credit for Players who finish 1st or 2nd in the Rookie of the Year voting (without accruing a full year of Major League service)

Players are excited to get back on the field, join their teammates and compete in the game they love.

(www.mlbplayers.com)