“Please, no more Braves injury news,” you all collectively begged the Large Language Model in the sky that is in charge of simulating our collective existence. Well, it heard your entreaties, and has responded in kind:
It’s a bombshell
of a Tuesday morning news drop, but at least it’s not, “Matt Olson and Chris Sale were involved in a tragic teleporter accident and no longer have the right number of arms,” so let’s count our blessings.
A lot of the highlights can be gleaned from this earlier Front Office Sports article. Basically:
- In late 2024, an anonymous whistleblower lodged a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board about Tony Clark that alleged all sorts of fun stuff: self-dealing, nepotism, misuse of resources, and abuse of power. Oh boy.
- Clark and the MLBPA lawyered up in response with different representation teams.
- The investigation appears to be related, at least in part, to how Clark and potentially other MLBPA functionaries who wore different “hats” between serving the MLBPA and working for OneTeam, which is a licensing/negotiating arm for the MLBPA, NFLPA, and a bunch of other player organizations, did or didn’t separate those dealings and/or enrich themselves as a result of serving both roles. I’m not entirely sure how that intersects with the entirety of the initial whistleblower complaint, so that’s a bit of a gray area for me.
Clearly, whatever direction and/or momentum the investigation has gathered has made it so Clark’s position as the MLBPA’s public face is no longer tenable. That could be because things are about to go south for Clark in a hurry, or it could be because the “issues” are “thorny” enough that Clark’s attention would be diverted to defending himself rather than doing whatever he does as MLBPA honcho on the regular. (Namely: press conferences and strongly worded statements with an anti-MLB owner bent.)
The timing of this is pretty gnarly for MLBPA, as they now have a potential succession/leadership issue on their hands, with less than a calendar year to go before the owners likely commence with another lockout in response to the current Collective Bargaining Agreement expiring.
Poking around before hitting publish on this post, it looks like players and player agents have been blindsided by this news. Marcus Semien noted to Joel Sherman that Clark’s resignation was to focus on defending himself against the federal investigation.
Remember when you thought the only interesting times to live in pertained to how many injuries the Braves were going to have in 2026? Yeah…
