Safeguarding the integrity of America’s game
When Jonathan Coyles ’05 joined Major League Baseball in 2007 as director of the league’s drug programs, baseball was in the midst of an investigation into steroid use by players seeking an edge in their performance.
Now, nearly two decades later, the league is still focused on maintaining the integrity of America’s game. But Coyles, now vice president of drug, health & safety programs, has a lot more to work on. “My role has grown into not just drug programs but all issues of player health and safety,” he says.
That means thinking about how to keep everyone involved—players in the major and minor leagues, umpires, fans and the organization’s staff members—free from harm. It means offering programs to quit smoking for those who need them, and treatment options for players who are abusing recreational drugs. It means developing and administering the league’s concussion protocol. And it means thinking about how to cope with the societal problem of opioid abuse; just recently, Coyles spoke at the White House about the league’s decision to make the lifesaving treatment naloxone available at all its ballparks.
“Baseball is a relatively safe sport,” Coyles says. And even though health and safety measures typically come to the table when negotiating the players’ collective bargaining agreement, “when your goal is to keep professional baseball players healthy, safe and out of harm’s way, you are not going to get a lot of disagreement from their legal representatives.”
Major League Baseball is a sprawling operation headquartered in New York City; Coyles works from home in Pittsford, New York, but is a regular on flights to the city. He was doing so even before Covid made work-from-home the default for so many people. One advantage: when the pandemic struck, they already had the communications infrastructure in place to keep the business going. During the epidemic, baseball players were tested every day; Coyles and his team managed that gargantuan task.
As part of the league’s labor relations department, he helps negotiate collective bargaining agreements not only with the major-league players, but also the minor-league players (with the exception of the affiliated Dominican Summer League) and the umpires, who have their own union. He also reviews policies that apply to non-unionized league employees such as managers, coaches and unsigned prospects coming out of the draft. “All in,” he says, “we manage about 7,500 players in our system, along with the non-playing personnel and umpires.”
Over the past couple of years, he says, Major League Baseball has intensified its focus on workplace safety. Like the National Football League, Coyles says, MLB has been working with team medical directors to develop emergency action plans—“making sure that we have emergency medical personnel at all workouts and games, ensuring that an appropriate number of individuals are CPR and AED certified, and making sure things like naloxone are available to doctors and athletic trainers.”
Of course, the culture is ever-changing, and Coyles and his colleagues need to help the sport adapt. The use of recreational marijuana, for example, is now legal in several U.S. states and Canada—a development that had to be addressed in league policy. “That’s a good example of the way the collective bargaining process can benefit both parties,” he says. “Historically, marijuana has always been considered a banned substance in baseball. In the minor leagues, marijuana was always tested for and sanctioned.” But in negotiations with the players’ union, it was decided that random testing for the drug no longer made sense, that it should be treated more like alcohol use.
But along with that decision, Coyles says, came an initiative to ramp up the league’s education and awareness around substance use and abuse, helping players—many of them not long out of high school—to recognize that it’s not a great career move to damage their high-performing bodies.
The work is demanding; “one of the expectations of working in professional sports is that you’re available 24/7/365,” Coyles says. “But not a day goes by when I don’t appreciate where I am and the job I’m able to do.”