Tony Clark resigned as head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, a person familiar with the union’s deliberations said Tuesday.
The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because his decision had not yet been announced. The union planned to make the announcement later Tuesday.
Clark’s decision took place during an investigation by the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, New York, into OneTeam Partners, a licensing company founded by the union, the NFL Players Association and RedBird Capital Partners in 2019.
“A lot of people have known that the investigation has been going on,” said the New York Mets’ Marcus Semien, a member of the union’s eight-man executive subcommittee. “I think that this happening during the investigation is not like, as a subcommittee, is not like overly surprising, but it still hurts and it’s still something I’m processing.”
The union’s executive board met Tuesday and did not make any decisions about a successor, the person said. The executive board planned to meet again Wednesday to consider its next steps.
Deputy executive director Bruce Meyer is set to be the primary negotiator in the upcoming labor talks, as he was in 2021-22. After Clark and Rick Shapiro led the 2016 negotiations, Meyer was hired in August 2018 as senior director of collective bargaining and legal and was promoted to his current role in July 2022.
Semien believes Clark is leaving to deal with the probe.
“I think so,