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Union official Harry Marino, right, speaks out about his attempt to oust MLBPA head Tony Clark. Courtesy of Sports Solidarity 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’s leadership, with a highly charged and public rebuke that rattled the baseball world for a week and left some in the industry questioning Marino’s motivations. Advertisement Since then, the turmoil inside the MLBPA has only accelerated, culminating in the players’ ouster of executive director Tony Clark in February. Previously silent on the rebellion since 2024, Marino now says he believes the effort should be remembered in a positive light: Not as a “coup, ” as top player agent Scott Boras once described it, but as the start of “an overdue reckoning. ” “The 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, ” Marino told The Athletic in the first interview he has given about the rebellion. “What 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. “I think what has happened in the last couple of months shows that. ” 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, and just this week, the PA said it has shuttered Players Way, its for-profit arm dedicated to youth initiatives that had little to show for millions in expenditures. More transparency on union spending was one of Marino’s primary talking points in 2024. Backed by some agents and players, including Jack Flaherty, Lucas Giolito and Ian Happ, Marino pushed Clark to conduct a financial audit.   The group also asked Clark to remove his second-in-command, Bruce Meyer, now the interim head of the union. Driven and aggressive, Marino at the time seemed to be angling for Meyer’s job, or perhaps even Clark’s, but the incumbents batted down the uprising. Players later in 2024 voted out Flaherty, Giolito and Happ from the PA’s executive subcommittee, a key group of eight players who interface with union leadership, and Meyer was unanimously elected to lead the union in February. Advertisement Marino says he would have only taken a PA leadership job if asked to, and that he wishes Meyer “nothing but the best. ” He said he also believes the union has improved over the last two years. But inside the union, Marino seems likely to remain persona non grata. “I don’t feel positively about anything negative that’s happened with the union or the players, ” Marino said. “Do I feel that on a personal level, it’s good for people to remember that I have always been about the players, and will always be about the players? … Yes. “It’s pretty clear that there was stuff going on that players needed to be made aware of. ” The MLBPA declined comment on Marino. Back in 2024, Clark slammed the mutiny as “a coordinated and covert effort. ” Marino called his well-wishes for Meyer “genuine. ” “I want the players to do well, ” he said. “I want players to maximize their earnings, and I want them to thrive. And so I’ll be on the sidelines, rooting for them to do just that, and certainly I’ll be rooting for Bruce to do just that. ” 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. Before he spoke to The Athletic, Marino took to social media to try to reframe his battle with the PA. “Scott Boras called it a coup, ” Marino wrote on X this week. “Others repeated the narrative. A federal investigation, a forced resignation, and a shut-down entity later, it’s time to acknowledge the truth. When player leaders and I stood up for the rank-and-file in 2024, we weren’t staging a coup — we were sounding the alarm. And we were right all along. ” Boras declined to comment. Marino, 35, is a former minor-league pitcher and 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’ union in 2022, and Marino came along with them. He didn’t stay long, however, leaving in 2023, after helping minor leaguers negotiate their first CBA. Advertisement Marino sometimes butted heads with Clark and Meyer when he was inside the union. He had already left by the time of the mutiny. “At the time, given that I was speaking on behalf of a very definite group of players, there came a point where I didn’t feel like it was appropriate to continue to kind of engage in a public back and forth, ” Marino said. “It was important for me to, at some point, correct the record. ” In the meantime, Marino has been working with players in Major League Rugby, the United Football League and Major League Pickleball. He has led two labor negotiations in the past 12 months. “We 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’t necessarily had a voice, ” Marino said. 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. “I think I, in a sort of obvious sense, blew a whistle a couple years ago about the MLBPA, ” Marino said. “Did I file something with any entity at that point about this? No. To the extent what I said set something in motion, I can’t speculate as to that, but I didn’t file anything. ” Marino declined to say whether he has spoken to federal investigators. Asked to detail what he was concerned about back in 2024, Marino cited “a general lack of transparency. ” “That’s really it, ” Marino said. “I 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. Advertisement “At 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’re 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’s actually happening with it. “I think I obviously was correct in assessing that that wasn’t really going on as of a couple years ago. But I’m glad to have seen it go in a better direction in the last couple years. ” He acknowledged, too, that the approach he and his cohorts took might have been flawed. Union officials were outraged at Marino’s gambit, and one player, Flaherty, quickly turned remorseful over the coup. Flaherty told The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal at the time that he put Clark “in a bad position” and that Marino “tried to push his way through. ” “Players in 2024 came to me and asked me for help, based upon seeing how I assisted the minor league players, ” Marino said. “If we made any mistake in 2024, it was simply being insufficiently calculated in what we were doing. ” Some agents and players have long held gripes about the union, but few critics have 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, they left Marino in the spotlight alone. Marino said he could not say whether the union has sufficiently answered the questions he raised because he’s too far removed. But he believes the PA has made improvements “in terms of the players getting answers to questions they had and/or information that they didn’t previously have, and making different decisions as a result. ” Advertisement The present moment is crucial for Meyer and the players, who are preparing for collective bargaining with a group of owners who appear motivated to push through a major change that the union has long opposed: a salary cap. One of the positions Marino took during the mutiny was that Meyer hadn’t done well enough on behalf of big leaguers in collective bargaining, even though the 2022-26 agreement Meyer negotiated improved issues of service-time manipulation and tanking, and is generally regarded in the industry as a win for players. The deal also directed additional money to young players. Back in 2024, Meyer wrote a letter to players warning, “Anyone peddling ‘easy fixes’ should be treated with suspicion. ” 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. “I think the underlying economic concerns that we talked about a couple years ago are still weighing heavily on players right now, ” Marino said. “The median player is significantly worse off now than they were 10 years ago, even though the league is doing better. ” Marino pointed to a 2025 Associated Press story that cited baseball’s median salary at the start of that season as $1. 35 million, a drop from a high of $1. 65 million in 2015. According to the union, salary distribution has remained largely unchanged. The union believes that median calculation is misleading because it overlooks the increase in the number of injury-list placements and active roster spots in the sport since 2015 (active rosters have increased by 30). That figure also doesn’t account for the pre-arbitration bonus pool, which was introduced in 2022. The union said that salaries below the median have increased significantly. The current minimum is $780, 000, and pre-arbitration players have seen their compensation increase by more than 50 percent during the current CBA compared to the last, according to MLBPA calculations. Advertisement “It remains to be seen whether the union can do better by the rank-and-file players than they have in recent years, but it’s my hope, certainly, that they can, ” Marino said. “Do I think that that can be achieved without a salary cap? I do, but the priority of the union has to be the well-being of every single member, including the median player, and not unfettered spending at the top at the expense of other players. “Free markets are great. Unfortunately, in this particular system, of the 7, 000 members that the MLBPA has, the reality is, what, less than 5 percent ever really get to avail themselves of a free market. ” Directly and indirectly, the MLBPA’s decision to unionize minor leaguers continues to have profound effects. Minor leaguers greatly outnumber their major-league counterparts. Minor leaguers don’t have a say in the major-league bargaining talks that are expected to soon begin, but on internal governance and leadership matters, the two groups’ voices are nearly equal. MLB players have 38 votes on the union’s executive board, and minor leaguers have 34. For those who participated in the process of organizing the minor leaguers, the division of credit can be a sensitive topic. But Marino is among a small group of individuals who can stake a major claim to that sea change. Regardless, then, of how one looks back on the mutiny, rebellion, uprising, coup — whatever one wants to term it — Marino has left his mark on the sport. “Probably I’m the person most responsible for 5, 000-plus of the current MLBPA members being in the union, ” Marino said while explaining his appreciation for his former organization. “I believe in this union in particular. I’m rooting for the players. I always have been and always will be. ” The union might disagree, however, that Marino is the person most responsible for the minor leaguers. At this point, though, what’s another disagreement? Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Play today's puzzle Evan Drellich is a senior writer for The Athletic, covering baseball. He’s the author of the book Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess. Follow Evan on Twitter @Evan Drellich