Ex-minor leaguer who led push for new union is leaving players association

May 28, 2024

Harry Marino, a lawyer and ex-minor leaguer who led the effort to build a minor league players’ union, is leaving the Major League Baseball Players Association next week to continue organizing workers at an entity that he’s founding.

Marino, 33, became the executive director of Advocates for Minor Leaguers in April of 2021. By late last summer, he and his team had built enough support among thousands of minor leaguers to move for a formal union, and the Major League Baseball Players Association took the group under its umbrella.

Marino then formally joined the MLBPA as well, and was an integral part of developing the first collective bargaining agreement for minor leaguers, which was agreed to just before the 2023 season.

With his new organization, which already has a website at marinoteam.org, Marino intends to try to replicate the success he had at Advocates for Minor Leaguers with other groups. In an email he sent to professional contacts on Wednesday, he said his aim is “to help workers across sports and beyond win the treatment they deserve.”

“Due to the visibility of my work on behalf of minor league players, I have been humbled in recent months to receive interest in such a venture from groups of workers, talented colleagues, and financial partners alike,” wrote Marino. “It is not easy to leave behind an institution as storied as the MLBPA, much less the minor league players that I care so much about.”

Marino declined to comment beyond the email.

In a statement, MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said: “We are grateful for Harry’s role, and the impact he has had, in support of all Minor League Players, and wish him all the best as he continues his work within the labor movement.”

Part of the success Marino fostered at Advocates for Minor Leaguers was owed to an aggressive public relations strategy. Marino continually spoke out about the working conditions of minor leaguers.

“At a high level, the player initiative is really just going to be about helping to educate players about things like the antitrust exemption, about the benefits of speaking with a collective voice,” Marino said when he arrived at Advocates in April 2021. “We’re hoping to basically embolden them to speak together and then speak out. The truth is, no individual player would speak out alone about the issues facing minor leaguers, or very few would. And frankly, you know, I wouldn’t encourage them to, considering the risk to their career and the unlikelihood that any one player speaking out is going to lead to anything. But our view is that 100 players, a thousand players, 3,000 players speaking out, collectively, that’s a different story.”

Given Marino’s success in the sports labor space thus far, he’s likely to receive interest when various sports union executive director jobs open in the future.

(Photo of a minor league game last week in Amarillo, Texas: John E. Moore III / Getty Images)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k3BpbWloanxzfJFsZmlvX2eDcLTAq6myZZ2Wv6q6zmakoqafp3qtscCgrJ5lpaO2sLqO