MLB and MLBPA should work together to prevent a future scandal

If nothing else, MLB and the MLBPA should work together to craft disciplinary rules preventing a future sign-stealing scandal.

It does nothing else, this week’s dustup between MLB and the MLBPA over the union’s alleged obstruction of efforts to penalize guilty Houston Astros players lays out a path to resolve the dispute going forward.

Let us be thankful for small favors.

In remarks before media Monday in Arizona, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said players were not disciplined at least in part because the Union objected to that idea early in the investigation into the scandal.

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“They asked us whether we had a disciplinary intention,” Manfred said. “We could not rule out discipline. The union indicated to us that would be a problem.”

MLBPA executive Tony Clark did not deny Manfred’s claim, but he did deny that the MLBPA had done anything more than point out to MLB what was already inscribed in the game’s rules. “MLB had (previously) stated that Club personnel [not players] were responsible for ensuring compliance with the rules,” Clark said, adding that “I am not going to apologize for defending players’ rights.”

At the same time, Clark added that the union was open to negotiations…in fact, those talks may already have started. “Written proposals have been exchanged, and we have made it clear to MLB that no issue is off the table,” the association said in a written statement. Clark added Tuesday that the association “understands the need for discipline going forward.”

The dispute encapsulates the natural tension existing between any labor group – whose goal is to protect the negotiated rights of its members – and any management entity, whose jobs inevitably include crisis management. And while it’s easy to get caught up in the back-and-forth over who’s responsible for the absence of discipline against past violators, an even more important step involves establishing processes to make sure the same mistake doesn’t happen twice…or more often.

There should be no second scandal and no question about who is punished if one does surface.

For an object lesson in this respect, the game need only look back to the steroid scandal, when Union obstinance stood in the way of the crafting of disciplinary measures throughout the 1990s until public outrage forced action.

In the early 1990s, Commissioner Fay Vincent raised alarms about the increasing use of performance-enhancing drugs by players. Yet it was not until after publication of the Mitchell Report in 2006 that MLB and the MLBPA jointly agreed on effective disciplinary and testing steps.

In the intervening decade, Union chief Donald Fehr consistently and successfully stood in the way of efforts to implement effective procedures, characterizing such ideas as a violation of player rights.

The game is still paying the price for that inaction, no more so than at Hall of Fame election time, when a huge rift is exposed in how steroid-era accomplishments are evaluated. Had the game’s elements come together to draft effective disciplinary strategies in the early 1990s, all the steroid-related problems of that scandal might have been avoided.

The major outgrowth of this week’s back-and-forth between Manfred and Clark almost certainly lays in the expressed willingness of both parties to work together going forward on measures designed to put an end to the electronic sign-stealing scandal before it has a chance to become a full-blown era in the game’s history.