Most of the exemption has eroded over the years.
In the United States Senate has nothing better to do department, Utah Republican Mike Lee and New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker want to see Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption pulled. Note to the two Senators, much of it has been stripped away over the years and the Sports Broadcast Act of 1961 gives sports leagues an antitrust exemption when it comes to negotiating national TV packages as leagues can sell their product as one entity. “As I’ve said before, baseball understands best of all the benefits of competition,” said Lee, chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights. “It is time for America’s pastime to be revitalized by the laws governing all American businesses.” Booker, the subcommittee ranking member, said baseball has enjoyed a “free pass” to break the rules of fair competition.
In 1922, Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a landmark decision granted Major League Baseball an antitrust exemption and said baseball was a sport. He was wrong. Baseball is a business. The court ruled in favor of baseball in the case involving the Federal League’s Baltimore Terrapins whose ownership felt the National and American Leagues of baseball didn’t do enough for them after the demise of the Federal League in 1915. The owners sued the two leagues and eventually it got to the Supreme Court and baseball got an antitrust exemption because it was a game not an interstate business even though the Brooklyn, New York Dodgers could play the Cincinnati, Ohio Reds in what was clearly an interstate business. Justice Holmes wrote that “personal effort, not related to production, is not a subject of commerce” and that baseball therefore wasn’t subject to federal regulation. Baseball on all levels is a business. More than a century ago, the Supreme Court got it all wrong.
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New Jersey Senator Cory Booker
