Both A-Rod and Taft-Harley have something in common besides hyphenated names.
A-Rod, aka Alex Rodriguez, the Yankees' highly compensated third baseman, over the weekend learned that an arbitration panel for Major League Baseball (MLB) had reduced his suspension from baseball to 162 games from 211 — in short, all of the 2014 season and postseason.
The arbitration decision followed an appeal by A-Rod last summer after MLB Commissioner Bud Selig suspended him for 211 games for abuse of performance-enhancing drugs and associated attempts at a cover-up and disruption of the discovery process.
Now A-Rod plans to sue in federal court today to overturn the decision under section 301 of the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, aka Taft-Hartley, which allows for corrective actions for violations of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs).
Others in MLB in the past have tried to overturn arbitrators' decisions. Steve Garvey won a reversal in federal court, but the Supreme Court overturned it and at the same time set up strict standards for not tampering with collectively bargained arbitration. Even MLB tried to get an arbitration overturned in 1976 when arbitrator Peter Seitz overturned baseball's reserve clause in the Andy Messersmith-Dave McNally case. (The reserve clause kept players permanently indentured to one team; the decision opened the floodgates for free agency.)
Not many legal observers seem willing to go to bat for A-Rod's chances.
Jeffrey Kessler, a partner at Winston & Strawn who has represented players and unions in many sports, told Fox News Latino:
There are very specific and narrow grounds for overturning an arbitration award. Either there has to be a showing of partiality by the arbitrator, or there has to be a showing that there as a manifest disregard of some settled legal principle, or there has to be a fundamental denial of what's called arbitral due process — the procedures were completely defective — or it could be in a collective bargaining context a decision that's contrary to what we call the essence of the CBA. So basically there are four targets and they have to hit one of them, and they're not easy.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that "the refusal of courts to review the merits of an arbitration award is the proper approach to arbitration under collective-bargaining agreements. The federal policy of settling labor disputes by arbitration would be undermined if courts had the final say on the merits of the awards."