MLBPA: Clark pay nearly doubled to $4.25M in ’23
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Jeff Passan, ESPN
Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark received more than $4.25 million in compensation in 2023, with a $3.25 million salary and $1 million bonus, nearly doubling his total the previous year, according to a union financial report released Monday.
The revelation of Clark’s salary, which was $2.25 million in 2022, comes in the wake of an uprising at the union in which attorney Harry Marino attempted to garner support from players to replace the union’s deputy executive director, Bruce Meyer.
While Marino could not rally the necessary backing to oust Meyer, his efforts calling for an internal audit on union finances gained significant traction among player leadership, sources told ESPN.
Clark’s salary is in the range of his contemporaries who have run major sports unions. Former NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith made $4.5 million in 2021 and $2.72 million in 2022. Former NBPA executive director Tamika Tremaglio received $3.1 million in her final year on the job. And NHLPA executive director Marty Walsh has a reported salary of $3 million after his predecessor, Donald Fehr, reportedly made $3.5 million per year.
In his first full year as executive director of the union in 2014, Clark received a salary of $1,993,525, according to the MLBPA’s LM-2, an annual filing that details union spending. The salary was nearly double that of his predecessor, Michael Weiner, who died of cancer in November 2013. Weiner and Fehr, the previous union executive director, capped their salaries at $1 million going back to the 1990s. Clark is expected to receive slight increases in his annual salary for the remainder of his contract, which runs through 2027.
The union’s revenues have grown significantly since Clark’s appointment. In 2014, the MLBPA’s total receipts were $64.7 million, according to the LM-2. Last year, the number was $191.8 million. The largest payments from 2023 include $49.6 million from Topps, $44 million from Fanatics, $28.6 million from the group licensing firm OneTeam Partners and $10.2 million from trading-card manufacturer Panini.
MLBPA spending on employee salaries has increased in recent years, according to the LM-2. In 2021, employees received $11.9 million, in 2022 it jumped to $15.4 million, and last year it was $16.6 million.
Marino, who helped organize minor league players and eventually integrate them into the MLBPA, worked for the union for less than a year before leaving amid clashes with top union officials. In a one-page letter he distributed to players advocating for the need of new leadership at the MLBPA, Marino said he would “trim the waste and excess” of the union’s spending, writing, “Our job is to make you rich, not the other way around.”
On a call two weeks ago that included members of the MLBPA’s 68-player executive board, players went back and forth on a number of subjects, including Meyer’s fitness for the job and the lack of communication from union officials. During discussions about the current leadership’s fitness for the job, sources said, multiple player leaders said they were unaware that the union had given Clark a five-year contract extension in November 2022.
Clark’s deal followed a 99-day lockout by MLB of the players who bridged most of the 2021-22 offseason. A bountiful winter, in which players received $3.9 billion in guaranteed money, followed the first year of the new deal, but free agent spending lagged in some areas this offseason, prompting player leaders to question Clark and Meyer’s stewardship.
The contretemps died down about a week after Marino told Clark he had significant player support to be installed as the new deputy executive director. While the full body of minor leaguers continued to back him, major league player support waned, and the MLBPA’s executive subcommittee — made up of eight elected players — eventually disavowed the efforts after members of the group initially backed Marino.
Still, multiple player representatives told ESPN they intend to call for an audit of the union’s finances, with the hope for it to start in the near future.
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Tim Keown
TOKYO — Shohei Ohtani seems impervious to a variety of conditions that afflict most humans — nerves, anxiety, distraction — but it took playing a regular-season big-league game in his home country to change all of that.
After the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ Opening Day 4-1 win over the Chicago Cubs in the Tokyo Dome, Ohtani made a surprising admission. “It’s been a while since I felt this nervous playing a game,” he said. “It took me four or five innings.”
Ohtani had two hits and scored twice, and one of his outs was a hard liner that left his bat at more than 96 mph, so the nerves weren’t obvious from the outside. But clearly the moment, and its weeklong buildup, altered his usually stoic demeanor.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shohei nervous,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But one thing I did notice was how emotional he got during the Japanese national anthem. I thought that was telling.”
As the Dodgers began the defense of last year’s World Series win, it became a night to showcase the five Japanese players on the two teams. For the first time in league history, two Japanese pitchers — the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the Cubs’ Shota Imanaga — faced each other on Opening Day. Both pitched well, with Imanaga throwing four hitless innings before being removed after 69 pitches.
“Seventy was kind of the number we had for Shota,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “It was the right time to take him out.”
The Dodgers agreed, scoring three in the fifth inning off reliever Ben Brown. Imanaga kept the Dodgers off balance, but his career-high four walks created two stressful innings that ran up his pitch count.
Yamamoto rode the adrenaline of pitching in his home country, routinely hitting 98 with his fastball and vexing the Cubs with a diving splitter over the course of five three-hit innings. He threw with a kind of abandon, finding a freedom that often eluded him last year in his first year in America.
“I think last year to this year, the confidence and conviction he has throwing the fastball in the strike zone is night and day,” Roberts said. “If he can continue to do that, I see no reason he won’t be in the Cy Young conversation this season.”
Cubs right fielder Seiya Suzuki went hitless in four at bats — the Cubs had only three hits, none in the final four innings against four relievers out of the Dodgers’ loaded bullpen — and rookie Roki Sasaki will make his first start of his Dodger career in the second and final game of the series Wednesday.
“I don’t think there was a Japanese baseball player in this country who wasn’t watching tonight,” Roberts said.
The Dodgers were without Mookie Betts, who left Japan on Monday after it was decided his illness would not allow him to play in this series. And less than an hour before game time, first baseman Freddie Freeman was scratched with what the team termed “left rib discomfort,” a recurrence of an injury he first sustained during last year’s playoffs.
The night started with a pregame celebration that felt like an Olympic opening ceremony in a lesser key. There were Pikachus on the field and a vaguely threatening video depicting the Dodgers and Cubs as Monster vs. Monster. World home-run king Saduharu Oh was on the field before the game, and Roberts called meeting Oh “a dream come true.”
For the most part, the crowd was subdued, as if it couldn’t decide who or what to root for, other than Ohtani. It was admittedly confounding: throughout the first five innings, if fans rooted for the Dodgers they were rooting against Imanaga, but rooting for the Cubs meant rooting against Yamamoto. Ohtani, whose every movement is treated with a rare sense of wonder, presented no such conflict.
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