Leadership in baseball changes about as often as it used to in the Kremlin and still does in Zhongnanhai. The last time there was turnover on the player’s union side was 1983, when a callow, aggressive lawyer named Donald Fehr took over during a virtual state of war between the men who own the teams and the men who played ball for them.

Fehr announced his retirement on Sunday after twenty-six years running the union. From a competitive point of view, there’s only one way to judge his tenure: a thorough success probably unequalled in the history of labor and certainly in the history of sports labor. The war that Fehr inherited is over. The owners, led by Bud Selig, have surrendered after Fehr spent two decades performing a work stoppage and salary structure whoop-ass on them. The man retires undefeated. Selig may hold the formal title of commissioner of baseball, but he is now widely considered secondary in power and authority to Fehr. Mike Weiner, a lawyer and Fehr protégé, the George H.W. Bush to Fehr’s Ronald Reagan, will be the new head of the union. Weiner is a kinder, gentler kind of guy. He wasn’t a principal in the union during the years in which the union struggled to become established as a serious player in the sport and doesn’t seem to carry the scars that Fehr does.

Weiner, however, has some serious cleaning up to do from parts of Fehr’s legacy, which goes a lot deeper than the issue of collective bargaining wins and losses.

•The “union” is a union in the same way the Republican Party is a union. That is, it’s a wholly-owned subsidiary of its wealthiest members. Those $80 million free agent contracts are what everybody thinks about when they think about the ascendancy of the union, but only a tiny percentage of guys who receive a paycheck for playing professional baseball ever get to the major leagues, and only a small percentage of those guys last long enough to make millions as a free agent. The players tolerate this because they have a lottery player’s mentality: they all think it’s going to be them, but the truth is that Fehr and the union were willing to let thousands of players blow their shot at an education or a trade with virtually no protection for their future in order to let a few of them hit it big. For every Albert Pujols, there’s a host of guys like Rob Garibaldi, the ex-USC outfielder, drug-addicted and in despair at not being able to make The Show. Pujols has a net worth in the nine figures. Garibaldi committed suicide in 2002 at the age of 24. Will Weiner expand the union’s protective umbrella to all professional baseball players, and not just an elite few?

• It’s a brutal world for ballplayers born south of the Rio Grande. Young Latin players are routinely ripped off by teams and agents and “talent scouts” who confiscate part of their paychecks. As teenagers, they’re exposed to ugly cocktails of who-knows-what steroids. They’re taken from their families in their teens and deposited in the minors in rural American communities with no language skills and no ideas about American customs. The player’s union has been way behind the curve on this one. (Oddly, the NFL union, otherwise a textbook example of how not to run a union, has been all over this kind of issue.)

• By agreeing to bind players to their teams for the first five to eight years of their professional lives, Fehr and Selig have colluded to eliminate bargaining power for young players and helped create a competitive system in which teams who confine themselves to a “youth movement,” perpetually turning over the roster every few years, can’t win but can make a ton of money. Fehr is as responsible as anyone for a generation of baseball fans in places like Pittsburgh and Kansas City having no chance to see winning baseball.

Weiner also faces a future substantially different than the one Fehr faced in the ‘80s. No one knows whether teams in places like Detroit can survive this “recession,” or what impact lower revenue streams will have on the high-dollar, long-term commitments teams have already made. It may be that Weiner is the guy who has to tell the players that for the first time in about 50 years, salaries are going to have to come down, careers will be shorter and fewer jobs will be available. It’s also possible that Selig will retire soon, too, and no union is lucky enough to get an opponent like that twice in a row.

One thing Weiner won’t have to deal with much is steroids: after years of balking at drug tests and serious penalties for steroid use, Fehr has spent the last two years backpedaling on the issue and has agreed that drug testing – and penalties for those found using – are going to be a part of major league baseball. He’s taken an enormous amount of criticism for coming so late to the anti-steroids party. “His legacy is tainted” seems to be the Commentariat AutoPilot setting. (Yes, I mean you, George Will.) Bob Costas, in full Dudgeon Mode, called Fehr “100 percent wrong” about the issue.

I hate to be the one to call Costas “shortsighted,” but someone has to do it.

When Fehr became union chief, baseball owners, operating under cover of the War on Drugs, were beating the drums for testing for marijuana and cocaine. They wanted to use positive tests to get out from under long-term, big money contracts. They demanded that players busted for drugs inform on recreational drug use by other players or face banishment from the game. Players went to jail over what said during investigations pushed for by baseball executives.

Fehr did the only thing any reasonable advocate and decent human being could do: he put a stop to it. He’s been taking the heat for it ever since. If Fehr was late accepting that steroids are a different issue, it’s because of his searing experience with the bad faith and cynicism of baseball’s drug policy in the past. The War on Drugs and its cynical uses are your culprit here, not Donald Fehr.