Time to get disappointed by a court case taking on MLB's antitrust exemption!
But that initial whiff of hope sure is something, right?
Baseball Twitter was all abuzz yesterday with the only baseball news going on at the moment: four former minor league teams are suing Major League Baseball to get rid of its antitrust exemption.
The four teams are the Staten Island Yankees, the Norwich Sea Unicorns, the Tri-City ValleyCats, and the Giants’ former short-season A-ball team, the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes (The Norwich Sea Unicorns are also somewhat Giants-related, in that they occupy the park that the Connecticut Defenders vacated when they moved to Richmond and became the Flying Squirrels). What specific issue is the pretext for their lawsuit? Why, take it away, law360 dot com:
According to the complaint, big league baseball teams are meant to compete with one another for affiliations with the minor league outfits that feed them players. By conspiring to reduce that competition pool, the minor league teams alleged, the MLB and its teams effectively engaged in a group boycott in order to cut costs.
That seems bad! I’d like to see Ol’ Robby Manfred wiggle his way out of THIS jam!
And cue Ol’ Robby Manfred wiggling his way out of this jam easily:
100 years ago, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s ruling that baseball had an antitrust exemption. It was not a good ruling — it was based on the idea that Major League Baseball did not constitute interstate commerce, which is so obviously false to modern ears to seem preposterous — but as far as the current Court is concerned, it’s precedent and they’re not going to touch it. It’s phenomenally unlikely that they’ll even take the case, because they have a very clear recent history of not taking cases like this.
In 2015, the Supreme Court didn’t hear a challenge to the antitrust exemption from the city of San Jose, which wanted the Giants’ territorial rights overturned so the A’s could move there. In 2017, they didn’t hear a case where minor league players alleged that MLB was colluding to suppress their salaries. In 2018, they didn’t hear a case about collusion to keep scouts’ salaries low, and they also didn’t hear a case in which property owners selling bleacher tickets across the street from Wrigley Field alleged that the Cubs building a new view-blocking addition to their park was an anti-competitive business practice.
They have, in other words, been forthright about their position.
Some outlets reporting on this news have pointed out one reason for optimism: Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, both recent appointees to the Court, are interested in sports law and don’t seem very fond of the antitrust exemption, which Gorsuch cited in his June opinion that allowed college athletes to make money off of their own likenesses. In his concurrence, Kavanaugh made arguments that were obviously analogous to the situation of minor leaguers:
In his concurring opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said the NCAA controls the market for college athletes and limits compensation to below-market rates, with no meaningful way for athletes to negotiate compensation.
And yet, even with all that, it’s not going to happen. The Supreme Court has punted this issue to Congress, insisting Congress clarifies its antitrust rules. Congress, though, has repeatedly declined to take it up, instead passing (after heavy lobbying from Major League Baseball) the asinine Save America’s Pastime Act, which exempted minor leaguers from federal minimum wage and overtime pay. They know where their bread is buttered, and until someone else gives them more butter on a larger slice of bread, there’s no point in dreaming.
So this is, in essence, a story that got some play because it would be interesting if it was newsworthy, or if we lived in a world where it could be newsworthy. Instead, it’s just a doomed lawsuit filed by four teams that are understandably angry that Major League Baseball left them out in the cold. They are going to fail, but their attempt can remind us of the damage that MLB has done, and the legal loophole that allows them to keep doing it.