Legal News

Torre Story: Yanks Mull Non-Disparagement Clauses After Joe?s Book

By Ashby Jones

For baseball fans, one of the true joys of living in New York is that even in the dreariest winter months, when the airwaves are dominated by ice hockey and mediocre Big East hoops, the Mets and Yankees somehow manage to continue making news.

The latest comes out of Yankeeville, and involves the team’s erstwhile manager, Joe Torre, now the skipper of the LA Dodgers. Controversial allegations made by Torre in his new book, The Yankee Years, about David Wells, Alex Rodriguez, and other Yankee players, have reportedly prompted the Yankees to think about tucking non-disparagement clauses into the contracts of coaches and managers. Here’s the story, from Newsday.

According to Newsday, a Yankee official said yesterday that some members of the front office staff already are required to sign a confidentiality agreement in order to protect “proprietary knowledge of our business model.” The proposed clause is intended to ensure that future books about the Yankees are “positive in tone,” and “do not breach the sanctity of our clubhouse.”

A few problems with this notion, though. The Major League Baseball Player’s Union apparently thinks that including such agreements into players’ contracts would violate the labor agreement (we’re not sure, frankly, if coaches and managers are covered by baseball’s collective bargaining agreement).

More generally, non-disparagement agreements have come under attack in recent years, subject to attacks that they violate the spirit of the First Amendment, though they’re apparently completely legal in most contexts. Click here for an NYT story from a few years back on media companies and non-disparagement agreements made with their laid off employees.

The agreements raise other questions, too, like what constitutes disparagement? After all, one person’s disparagement is another’s backhanded compliment.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 30, 2009 (boomark / email).