Requiem for Donald Fehr

I wasn’t going to comment on Donald Fehr’s retirement.  The media is full of stories that basically summarize Fehr’s tenure as executive director of the MLB Players’ Association: he gained a lot for the players in their struggles with management, particularly in terms of player salaries and benefits, but he was behind the curve on the steroids issue.  However, I read Gwen Knapp’s article in the SF Chronicle today, and I suddenly felt like I should say something.

One of the problems with articles written by newspaper reporters is that they have to be written in order to sell newspapers.  This means writing down to the lowest common denominator and also making issues about individual personalities and the struggles between dynamic individuals, rather than correctly describing the larger institutional forces behind specific individuals’ actions or positions.

Gwen Knapp’s article is a perfect example.  Her article makes the MLBPA’s failure on the steroids issue Donald Fehr’s personal failure, which really gives too much credit (or blame) to Fehr individually and fails to understand or explain how the MLBPA’s failure was really the failure of the union’s membership (i.e., the players as a group).

From everything I’ve read, the MLBPA is a very democratic organization.  Decisions are made by the union’s executive board, which is primarily comprised of players.  Fehr and Gene Orza, the long-time general counsel, and other permanent staffers, provide advice, experience and legal counsel, but it is ultimately the players as a group (by majority vote) who make the decisions on the MLBPA’s policy.  That is the main reason why the union responded so poorly on the steroid question.

Forty years ago, before anyone in baseball knew anything about steroids or human growth hormone, Jim Bouton is his classic Ball Four wrote that if there was a pill that pitchers could take that would make them 20-game winners but would take five years off their lives, an awful lot of pitchers would take it. That, in a nutshell, is steroids, only with less certainty that it will guarantee success or take years off your life.

At the time Bouton was writing (1969), use of greenies (dexedrine, an amphetamine) was rampant in the game, had been in common use since the late 1950’s or early 1960’s, and continued to be widely used until MLB’s recent drug policy went into effect in the last few years.  Those who have been following the game for a long time may remember the minor scandal involving the Phillies in the early 1980’s in which pitcher Randy Lerch testified in court that a team doctor for the Phillies’ AA team prescribed him greenies and that numerous players on the Phillies used them.  Stars as big as Pete Rose and Willie Mays either admitted or were accused of using them.

The point is that players have always turned a blind eye when it came to the things that they and other players were putting into their bodies to improve performance.  By the time that it had become obvious to the public that a large number of major league players were using steroids, a large number of major players were, in fact, using steroids, greenies or both.

I obviously can’t say what happened at the closed-door sessions of the MLBPA’s executive board meetings, but I would wager that a few players who were clean, like Curt Schilling among other vociferous anti-steroids players, spoke out on how steroids were a scurge, etc., etc., and few other players made more muted statements about how it should be up to each player to decide for himself as an adult what or what not to put into his body, and then a large majority of the membership quietly voted down any action to test for steroids.

The problem was that a LOT of players were using illegal substances, and most of them probably felt that the ‘roids, greenies or whatever gave them an edge.  I’m sure that plenty of players felt that without steroids they wouldn’t be major league players, they wouldn’t be starters, or they wouldn’t be big stars pulling in the really big salaries.

The consensus is that steroids do actually improve athetic performance, and the members of the union are almost all young men between age 20 and 40, who are all looking for a competitive edge.  If steroids make them better players, but have long term risks, an awful lot of players will take those risks.

One thing we don’t know is what, if anything, Donald Fehr or Gene Orza told the members about the long-term consequences of steroid use and the long-term reprecussions when the public found about about rampant steroid use.  For all we know, Fehr and Orza may have warned the players ten ways to Sunday about the risks and the consequences of steroid use, and the players still decided to stone-wall any meaningful action on testing.

Fehr and Orza are career lawyers.  A lawyers’ job is to provide his client with unvarnished, accurate advice about risks and consequences, and then once the client has made a decision, so long as that decision does not clearly violate the law, to advocate doggedly on behalf of the client.  Once the players collectively made a decision to resist drug-testing, Fehr, as a career lawyer, was going to champion the players’ position to the gates of hell, if necessary.

Making the steroids era any one person’s failure, while perhaps making for a better story, has little to do with what actually happened.  An awful lot of people — players, the union, everyone on the management side, and the for-profit media — were making money hand over fist from the homerun and offense barrage that was the period from about 1995-2004.  Juiced players putting up big numbers put cans in the seats, which is the ultimately goal of any entertainment enterprise.  It was a collective failure throughout baseball, and everyone in the game deserves some share of the blame.