MLBPA Chief Tony Clark Is Stepping Down 10 Months Before Baseball’s CBA Expires

The 2026 baseball season is either a week old or still weeks away, depending upon whether you count its beginning from the first grainy and distant social media photos of pitchers stretching on back fields or the first games that count. Either way, the positional jockeying for a potential 2027 owner lockout has already begun, because how else would the league follow its most entertaining World Series of the century? You can only cruise on the comedy stylings of Nick Castellanos for so long, right?

This morning's news that MLB players union head Tony Clark is about to resign, though, brings the doomsigning to the front of the church for the first time this season. Up until now, the pre-lockout sniping was coded and qualified, and mostly confined to "The Dodgers Are Ruining Baseball" chants from ownership-side people who see the Pittsburgh Pirates as a model franchise. Since the six people who believe that never gather in the same place at the same time, we cannot herd them together and nailgun them to outfield seats at loanDepot Park for the season. The news from camps, for the most part, was not yet or not really news, mostly about Castellanos's problematic Bluetooth speaker usage and the Emmanuel Clase pitch-throwing case.

And Clark's pending resignation, while surely news in a way all that isn't, has not yet been fully explained. It may well have connections to the apparently disastrous eight-figure investment the union made in a for-profit youth baseball company and a federal investigation in the Eastern District of New York into Clark specifically for self-dealing, misuse of resources, and abuse of power at the union. It certainly is abrupt; Clark's scheduled meeting with the Cleveland Guardians on Tuesday was canceled at the last minute. There were denials all around, but regardless of factual roots the timing of Clark's resignation suggests that the union's strategy for beating back the owners' salary cap demands needs a different front man. Either way, it will have one.