NEW YORK — In announcing his resignation as baseball's president and chief operating officer, Paul Beeston is hoping his departure will spark negotiations for a new labor contract.
Beeston, who held the job since July 1997, was the baseball official most trusted by the players' association, and was seen as a moderating influence in a sport plagued by labor strife for three decades.
Beeston, management's chief negotiator with the union, will be replaced as president and COO by Bob DuPuy, commissioner Bud Selig's longtime lawyer.
"Regrettably, we have been unable to achieve a new collective bargaining agreement — which would have been our most satisfying achievement," Beeston said Thursday.
"While I was fully committed over the 4 1/2 years to meeting the challenge of negotiating a new agreement, I now have reached the conclusion that a change in negotiators may be the catalyst necessary to consummate an agreement to remedy the enormous economic problems the game now faces."
Beeston's departure is effective March 15. His authority had appeared to wane since last summer, when he and union officials had discussions exploring a new labor contract. Steve Fehr, the brother of union head Donald Fehr, said there were 24 meetings from March through June. While some on the union side appeared to think the sides were making progress, talks stopped, with players saying Selig directed the cutoff.
"If they weren't full-fledged formal negotiating meetings, they were pretty close to it," Donald Fehr said in December, "and there were precise proposals and counterproposals."
Talks, slowed by management's failed attempt to eliminate the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos, resumed after the World Series, and owners presented their proposals on Jan. 9 and Feb. 26. The union, which isn't happy with management's plan to slow the growth in salaries and take away revenue from large-market teams, said it hopes to respond by next week.
DuPuy, who had been executive vice president for administration and chief legal officer, said management's labor delegation is now headed by a triumvirate that includes himself, executive vice president of labor relations Rob Manfred and Howard Ganz, a lawyer with Proskauer Rose LLP who also has represented the NBA and NHL.
Since the first work stoppage in 1972, owners have gone through eight chief negotiators: John Gaherin, Ray Grebey, Lee MacPhail, Barry Rona, Chuck O'Connor, Richard Ravitch, Randy Levine and Beeston. In that same period, players have been represented by Marvin Miller, Kenneth Moffett (for two years between negotiations) and Fehr.
"The union has a written proposal from us. That proposal hasn't changed," DuPuy said. "Hopefully, we're going to bargain from that proposal and reach a deal."
Fehr declined comment, and Selig and Beeston did not return telephone calls.
In other moves, Tampa Bay Devil Rays chief operating officer John McHale Jr. was hired to succeed DuPuy as executive vice president of administration and Jonathan Mariner, a former executive vice president of the Florida Marlins, will replace Jeff White as senior vice president and chief financial officer.
Mariner and Jimmie Lee Solomon, the senior vice president of baseball operations, are the highest-ranking black officials in the commissioner's office.