Baseball union chief close to succeeding Fehr

NEW YORK (AP) — The man poised to become the first new leader of baseball’s powerful union in more than a quarter-century is a ballplayer’s lawyer.

Michael Weiner speaks plainly, wears jeans and sneakers to work — and after more than 20 years with the Major League Baseball Players Association, knows his stuff.

“Michael has the ability to break things down to the players,” pitcher Tom Glavine said. “He speaks English. He doesn’t speak lawyer talk.”

Weiner is likely to succeed Donald Fehr as executive director of the players’ association on Wednesday during the organization’s annual board meeting. He will be just the fourth head of the union since 1966.

And while Fehr has a similar sartorial sense, the two men have far different styles otherwise.

Weiner talks in far shorter and simpler sentences and represents a generational shift from his 61-year-old predecessor, who went to work for union head Marvin Miller in 1977 and took over as head six years later after Ken Moffett’s brief tenure.

Weiner, who turns 48 on Dec. 21, has been a baseball union lawyer for nearly his entire professional life.

After graduation from Williams College and Harvard Law School, Weiner clerked for a federal judge and got hired by Fehr in 1988 as a staff lawyer.

While the union was under constant attack during the first half of Fehr’s reign — there was a two-day strike in 1985, a 32-day lockout in 1990 and a 7 1/2-month strike in 1994-95 that wiped out the World Series — Weiner faces different challenges as head of a membership with an average salary of just under $3 million.

Drug testing — and now congressional scrutiny — are a fact of life in the major leagues.

Management is likely to want to tinker with complex economic issues such as revenue sharing and the luxury tax, and teams already have said they want to widen the amateur draft to cover international players and institute a slotting system that would eliminate individual negotiations for draft picks.

For Weiner, the 1994-95 strike and the negotiations that finally led to an agreement in March 1997 were the seminal event in baseball’s labor-management relations.