Two years ago, Harry Marino, a labor organizer and former attorney for the Major League Baseball Players Association, helped orchestrate a player mutiny challenging that union\u2019s leadership, a highly charged and public rebuke that rattled the baseball world for a week and left some in the industry questioning Marino\u2019s motivations.<\/p>\n
Since then, the turmoil inside the MLBPA has only accelerated, culminating in the players\u2019 ouster of executive director Tony Clark in February. Previously silent on the rebellion since 2024, Marino now says he believes the effort<\/a> should be remembered in a positive light: not as a \u201ccoup,\u201d as top player agent Scott Boras once described it<\/a>, but as the start of \u201can overdue reckoning.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea that it was some underhanded effort, rather than a genuine attempt to assist the players in something they wanted to do, in the way that they wanted to do it, was just not true,\u201d Marino told The Athletic in the first interview he\u2019s given about the rebellion. \u201cWhat happened in 2024 got a lot of public attention and was portrayed as a power struggle, but for me, it was always 100 percent substantive.<\/p>\n \u201cI think what has happened in the last couple of months shows that.\u201d<\/p>\n Players pushed Clark out this spring after an internal investigation revealed he had an inappropriate relationship with an employee, his sister-in-law. The Department of Justice last year started to probe his handling of union finances<\/a>, and the PA just this week said it has shuttered Players Way, its for-profit arm dedicated to youth initiatives that had little to show<\/a> for millions in expenditures.<\/p>\n More transparency on union spending was one of Marino\u2019s primary talking points. Backed by some agents and players, including Jack Flaherty, Lucas Giolito and Ian Happ, Marino pushed Clark to conduct a financial audit.\u00a0 The group also asked Clark to also remove his second-in-command, Bruce Meyer, now the interim head of the union.<\/p>\n Driven and aggressive, Marino at the time seemed to be angling for Meyer\u2019s job, or perhaps even Clark\u2019s, but the incumbents batted down the uprising. Players later in 2024 voted out Flaherty, Giolito and Happ from the PA\u2019s executive subcommittee, a key group of eight players who interface with union leadership, and Meyer was unanimously elected to lead the union in February.<\/p>\n Marino says he would have only taken a PA leadership their jobs if asked to, and that he wishes Meyer \u201cnothing but the best.\u201d He said he also believes the union has improved over the last two years.<\/p>\n But inside the union, Marino seems likely to remain persona non grata.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t feel positively about anything negative that\u2019s happened with the union or the players,\u201d Marino said. \u201cDo I feel that on a personal level, it\u2019s good for people to remember that I have always been about the players, and will always be about the players? \u2026 Yes.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s pretty clear that there was stuff going on that players needed to be made aware of.\u201d<\/p>\n The MLBPA declined comment on Marino. Back in 2024, Clark slammed<\/a> the mutiny as \u201ca coordinated and covert effort.\u201d<\/p>\n Marino called his well wishes for Meyer \u201cgenuine.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI want the players to do well,\u201d he said. \u201cI want players to maximize their earnings, and I want them to thrive. And so I\u2019ll be on the sidelines, rooting for them to do just that, and certainly I\u2019ll be rooting for Bruce to do just that.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, Marino works to unionize athletes outside of baseball through a firm he founded, Sports Solidarity. But he still occasionally receives inquiries about what happened with the MLBPA. Now, he believes it should be obvious.<\/p>\n Before he spoke to The Athletic, Marino took to social media to try to reframe his battle with the PA.<\/p>\n \u201cScott Boras called it a coup,\u201d Marino wrote on X<\/a> this week. \u201cOthers repeated the narrative. A federal investigation, a forced resignation, and a shut-down entity later, it\u2019s time to acknowledge the truth. When player leaders and I stood up for the rank-and-file in 2024, we weren\u2019t staging a coup \u2014 we were sounding the alarm. And we were right all along.\u201d<\/p>\n Boras declined to comment.<\/p>\n Marino, 35, is a former minor-league pitcher and was a key figure in the effort to unionize minor league players via the nonprofit Advocates for Minor Leaguers. In a landmark decision, Clark invited those young players inside the big leaguers\u2019 union in 2022, and Marino came along with them. He didn\u2019t stay long, however, leaving in 2023, after helping minor leaguers negotiate their first CBA.<\/p>\n Marino sometimes butted heads with Clark and Meyer when he was inside the union. He had already left by the time of the mutiny.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the time, given that I was speaking on behalf of a very definite group of players, there came a point where I didn\u2019t feel like it was appropriate to continue to kind of engage in a public back and forth,\u201d Marino said. \u201cIt was important for me to, at some point, correct the record.\u201d<\/p>\n In the meantime, Marino has been working with players in Major League Rugby, the United Football League and Major League Pickleball. He\u2019s led two labor negotiations in the past 12 months.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are engaged in essentially replicating and scaling what I did at Advocates for Minor Leaguers, which is trying to provide a voice to folks across sports who have limited leverage and haven\u2019t necessarily had a voice,\u201d Marino said.<\/p>\n Marino said he was not the whistleblower who filed an anonymous complaint with the National Labor Relations Board in late 2024 about Clark and the MLBPA that eventually made its way to the attention of the Department of Justice and effectively served as a precursor to the ongoing probe, run by the Eastern District of New York.<\/p>\n \u201cI think I, in a sort of obvious sense, blew a whistle a couple years ago about the MLBPA,\u201d Marino said. \u201cDid I file something with any entity at that point about this? No. To the extent what I said set something in motion, I can\u2019t speculate as to that, but I didn\u2019t file anything.\u201d<\/p>\n Marino declined to say whether he\u2019s spoken to federal investigators.<\/p>\n Asked to detail what he was concerned about back in 2024, Marino cited \u201ca general lack of transparency.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s really it,\u201d Marino said. \u201cI knew that some of the spending was not what the players knew, but I also just knew that over time, the union had moved in a direction where the players were further removed from the details of what was happening, and that there was a need for the players to get back closer to the ground level on that stuff.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the end of the day, it comes out of a respect for the fact that it is really, really hard to become a professional baseball player at any level, minor league, certainly major league. You get to do it for a very short period of time. If you\u2019re paying a percentage of your salary into an organization, you deserve to know that that money is going to work for you. And you need to certainly just get to know what\u2019s actually happening with it.<\/p>\n \u201cI think I obviously was correct in assessing that that wasn\u2019t really going on as of a couple years ago. But I\u2019m glad to have seen it go in a better direction in the last couple years.\u201d<\/p>\n He acknowledged, too, that the approach he and his cohorts took might have been flawed.<\/p>\n Union officials were outraged at Marino\u2019s gambit, and one player, Flaherty, quickly turned remorseful over the coup. Flaherty told The Athletic\u2019s Ken Rosenthal at the time<\/a> that he put Clark \u201cin a bad position\u201d and that Marino \u201ctried to push his way through.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cPlayers in 2024 came to me and asked me for help, based upon seeing how I assisted the minor league players,\u201d Marino said generally. \u201cIf we made any mistake in 2024, it was simply being insufficiently calculated in what we were doing.\u201d<\/p>\n Some agents and players have long held gripes about the union, some of them likely rooted in self-interest. But few complainants have ever been willing to speak publicly or take action. Two years ago, some of those discontented voices found a willing and eager front man in Marino. Yet, when the situation grew ugly and intense, they left Marino in the spotlight alone.<\/p>\n Marino said he could not say whether the union has sufficiently answered the questions he raised because he\u2019s too far removed. But he believes the PA has made improvements \u201cin terms of the players getting answers to questions they had and or information that they didn\u2019t previously add, and making different decisions as a result.\u201d<\/p>\n The present moment is a crucial one for Meyer and players, who are preparing for collective bargaining with a group of owners who appear motivated to push through a major change<\/a> that players have long been opposed to: a salary cap.<\/p>\n One of the positions Marino took during the mutiny was that Meyer hadn\u2019t done well enough in collective bargaining on behalf of big leaguers, even though the 2022-26 agreement Meyer negotiated is generally regarded in the industry as a win for players, improving issues of service-time manipulation and tanking. The deal also directed additional money to young players.<\/p>\n Back in 2024, Meyer wrote a letter<\/a> to players warning, \u201cAnyone peddling \u2018easy fixes\u2019 should be treated with suspicion.\u201d<\/p>\n Marino, who has baseball bargaining experience on the minor-league side, still believes the union needs to do more to help middle-class big leaguers.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the underlying economic concerns that we talked about a couple years ago are still weighing heavily on players right now,\u201d Marino said. \u201cThe median player is significantly worse off now than they were 10 years ago, even though the league is doing better.\u201d<\/p>\n