LAKELAND, Fla. — Fresh off his best and longest outing of spring training, Jack Flaherty stood in front of a Detroit Tigers backdrop as he met with reporters Tuesday evening.

“Baseball questions first,” Flaherty said. “I know it’s coming.”

The “it” in this case referred to questions about baseball’s news of the day: the explosive meeting that broached the idea of ousting top Major League Baseball Players Association leadership.

In 2022, Flaherty was elected as one of eight members of the union’s executive subcommittee, making him an important voice in labor issues.

The focus of Monday night’s meeting centered on the idea of replacing MLBPA deputy director Bruce Meyer, Tony Clark’s second in command, with 33-year-old Harry Marino, the former MLBPA lawyer who spearheaded the unionization of the minor leagues last year.

“The minor leaguers really appreciated the way he handled their unionization,” Flaherty said of Marino. “And so guys have listened and paid attention. As leaders and player reps, your job is to listen to the entire league and, now being all under one union, listen to the guys who are coming next. So that’s our job, and that’s kind of how we’ve come to the point where we did yesterday. ”

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Flaherty, a seven-year MLB veteran, framed the meeting as a cooperative effort among players aimed at being prepared for baseball’s next collective bargaining negotiations. The current CBA, negotiated after a lockout, expires Dec. 1, 2026.

“You want to have continuous discussions,” Flaherty said. “You want to have player involvement, which sometimes is down in the years leading up to a CBA, and it all happens all at once. So it’s good to get everybody together and talk things out and figure out what kind of plan you want to work with and which way we want to go. How do we prepare for this so it doesn’t all happen right before?”

Flaherty said he has been on the phone “nonstop” the past three or four days, talking to players around the league and hearing concerns about the state of the game under the current CBA. Frustrations are wide-ranging but often come back to teams’ lack of spending. Left-handed pitcher Blake Snell, a two-time Cy Young Award winner, just signed with the San Francisco Giants for two years and $62 million, with an opt-out after the first season.

“What are we going to do?” Flaherty said. “How are we going to make improvements? Because we’re in a spot where we’ve got free agents who are still out there, we’ve got Snell signing for basically a one-plus-one. Things are not working out as well as they had the first two years (of the CBA), and guys are trying to figure out, ‘OK, how do we prep for this next one?’”

This winter’s free-agent market moved slowly, with Scott Boras clients Cody Bellinger, Matt Chapman and Snell not signing until after spring training began and all for less than initially projected. Other players such as J.D. Martinez and Jordan Montgomery remain unsigned, and a long list of free agents who constitute baseball’s middle class are also looking for work.

“I wouldn’t say it’s just from that,” Flaherty said of union discontentment. “But (free agency) is the big, glaring issue that everybody can see. Everybody can see the spending being down. And you can see that it’s down by — I don’t know what the number is — but if you take away the two signings by the Dodgers, it’s down by way more than that. Players are smart, and we’re gathering together to all head in the right direction together.”

Player spending among MLB clubs is down from $3.9 billion last winter to $2.8 billion this offseason, per Spotrac. Casey Mize, the Tigers’ player rep, said Monday night’s meeting was “at times” intense. But like Flaherty, he had a measured tone while discussing the union’s worries.

“This spans years of just trying to get better,” Mize said. “(The 2020 season), the lockout, the CBA, past CBAs, just always examining where you can get better. If a majority of players think we can get better in this area, then we’ll see what happens.”

The Athletic’s Evan Drellich reported Marino’s supporters circulated a PowerPoint presentation criticizing Clark’s and Meyer’s bargaining effectiveness and raising concerns over the union’s budget decisions.

What, exactly, could current union leadership be doing better?

“I’m going to keep that in-house,” Flaherty said. “We’ve had conversations, and I think that’s what we’re talking about and trying to figure out.”

Asked point-blank whether he felt a change was needed at the top of the union, Flaherty did not provide a direct answer.

“It’s all players getting together, continuing talking and moving in the right direction, which is what I feel that we’re doing,” Flaherty said. “It’s not one side versus the other. It’s everybody working towards the same thing.”

(Photo: Nathan Ray Seebeck / USA Today)