Chris Townsend

We learned today that long time MLBPA boss Donald Fehr is retiring, ceding his position to current union general counsel Michael Weiner.

Like almost everything he has done since taking the position in 1983, Fehr's departure has engendered a wide range of strong responses — people tend to love or hate the guy, like so many businessmen in similar positions.

But here's the bottom line: Donald Fehr never did anything but his job. As the big cheese at the player's union, he was charged with representing the interests of baseball players — not the integrity of the game, not the greater good, but the very particular needs and desires of Major League Baseball's athletes.

And what did he do for those guys, exactly? Well, he presided over a ridiculous salary explosion, he earned them countless fringe benefits with his hard-line negotiating (for example, the 10-and-5 rule that Rob Neyer mentioned on the show tonight), and he managed to avoid any sort of meaningful drug testing throughout a period of time in the sport wherein I think we can finally agree that a lot (if not the vast majority) of the principles in the game were aware of a massive and pervasive drug problem.

Some people want to criticize Fehr for this — Chris said it on the show earlier tonight, something to the effect of "Fehr has gotten a pretty free pass for his part in the steroid era and probably bears more responsibility than he is generally given." If the point is that he knew guys were doing drugs, then I would agree that he certainly did; if the point is that he should have done anything other than strive to avoid a testing program, I could not disagree more.

Again, it's about the interests of the players... If players are doing drugs, and it's helping them smack more dingers and earn more dollars, then by all means their representative should do what he can to keep that racket running, right? I certainly think so. That's the kind of representative I would want.

It's like Scott Boras — he seems like a sleazeball, he rubs a lot of people the wrong way, but his CLIENTS almost invariably end up better for it. At the end of the day, the players as a whole were Donald Fehr's clients, and he served them just about as well as possible.

The one argument I buy against Fehr, at least in principle, is the idea some have floated that he did non-steroid users wrong by fighting drug testing, and that he essentially eschewed the little guy for the big money-making juiced bats. But as more and more names come out, and we find out that (a) it may very well have been that an actual majority of players were using some form of illicit performance-enhancer; and (b) there were just as many — if not more — guys like F.P. Santangelo on the juice as there were stars like A-Rod or Barry Bonds, it seems to me that even this argument fails to hold water.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you Donald Fehr is an angel, or even that he's someone you would want your children to aspire to be, but if you measure a man by the level of success he has in his professional life there's no doubt Fehr stands tall.

I'm Kolsky, and I've said enough.