Major League Baseball’s surprise new enemy: Republicans
(with the Babe at the plate)
Baseball’s antitrust exemption has never made any sense and everyone knows it. Antitrust law was developed back in 1890 with the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act designed to promote the ultimate American business value: free and fair competition. It forbids things like price-fixing, monopolies, and other forms of collusion that restrain trade and prevent a free-market system. There has probably never been a substantive bill offered in Congress more universally endorsed – 51 of 52 Senators and ALL 242 House of Representatives at that time voted in favor of the bill! The law applies to essentially every business engaged in interstate commerce in the United States, including prominent professional sport leagues like the NFL, the NBA, and the NHL.
The sole exception is Major League Baseball. Baseball’s antitrust exemption was created by the U.S. Supreme Court nearly a century ago, when baseball was considered the closest thing to God in many people’s minds and anything that threatened it, the devil. None other than Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the most respected and distinguished Jurists in American history, sought to justify baseball’s unique exclusion from antitrust law in the landmark case of Federal Baseball Club vs. National League by proclaiming in 1922 that baseball was not a business but rather merely an “exhibition” and that it somehow didn’t involve interstate commerce.
Even if that naive and idyllic view of baseball was true at that time, a dubious proposition, it certainly wasn’t by 1969 when St.Louis Cardinals’ colorful centerfielder Curt Flood challenged baseball’s “reserve clause” that bound every player to a team for perpetuity. No one worth their legal diploma could deny that the reserve clause constituted an antitrust violation. But in a close 5-3 decision, the Supreme Court in 1972 reaffirmed baseball’s antitrust exemption – not because it made any sense or was accurate (Justice Blackmun writing for the Court essentially admitted that it didn’t), but solely because of precedent. It had been the law of the land, rightly or wrongly, for 50 years and he said it was up to Congress, not the Court, to change it (ignoring the fact that it was the Supreme Court itself who created the exemption out of thin air).
Since 1972 there have been numerous calls to eliminate the nonsense of putting baseball on some special pedestal that treats it better than any other business or sports league. But all have been resisted by Congress – thanks largely to Republicans.
Fast forward to the last several years where large groups of minor league players have begun to press the case that they have been grossly underpaid and that MLB has financially abused them by failing to pay them a livable wage -indeed lower than even the federally-required minimum wage. Other complaints have included that they aren’t paid a dime for Spring training and that their time at games, practice, in the weight room, with the trainer and video coach, in meetings and in travel often exceeds 40 hours per week and would qualify them for overtime pay. In the face of pending class action lawsuits on these subjects, MLB was able to lobby its friends in Congress, again mostly Republicans, to help. Indeed, Congressional MLB benefactors quietly and brazenly included language completely exempting Major League Baseball from standard federal minimum wage and overtime law on page 1,967 of a 2,232-page omnibus spending bill in 2018 that needed to pass to keep the government open.
The purveyors of this deception even had the audacity to name this bill within the bill the “Save America’s Pastime Act” – because apparently the billionaires that own MLB teams and the multibillion favorite game of mostly older Americans needs “protection” from minor league baseball players making on average less than $10,000 per year! The fact is that if MLB owners were to pay every minor league player in their system- about 180 players- a livable wage of say $50,000 a year, that would cost each team $9 million per year, or only a little above the average cost of one additional major league player.
But then November 2020 came and Donald Trump lost the Presidential election. Chaos reigned. He and his ardent followers have still not accepted defeat and have demanded that legislation be enacted to make voting more onerous for those who voted against him. They’ve called for limiting voting by mail, requiring more forms of identification, putting up as many procedural roadblocks as they can think of and, most absurdly, making it a crime to hand out water to people standing in line to vote. And many states with Republican-controlled legislative majorities have complied with the demands of their Fuhrer.
Lots of people are outraged by this transparent attempt to disenfranchise voters, especially minorities. Even major businesses have gotten into the act of criticizing these laws because folks who run corporations are run by people who are under ever-increasing pressure to be responsible citizens and call out behavior and acts that are discriminatory, anti-democratic and plain wrong. The problem is there are lots of folks in this country who apparently don’t care about such things – to them, it’s all about winning elections and having control and power regardless of how you achieve it. Accordingly, they have sought to punish any company that dares to speak out or take actions against these new voting restriction laws.
Corporations have played an increasingly major role in politics, primarily supporting Republicans, thanks to the Republican-sponsored 2010 abhorrent Citizens United case. And yet, Republicans suddenly no longer want corporations to be engaged politically. Indeed, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell recently admonished companies to “stay out of politics”- the very companies that have helped get him elected repeatedly over the last 35 years! (He explains with a straight face, as only a skilled politician can, that corporations should still be allowed to give unlimited money; they just shouldn’t talk about politics.) McConnell further warned that “Republicans drink Coca-Cola too,” in a non-disguised threat that if companies complain about voting restrictions in places like Georgia (where Coke is based), they will tell their flock of followers to stop drinking their product and may punish them with legislation.
Which gets us back to Major League Baseball and antitrust law. In 2019, MLB picked the City of Atlanta to host the traditionally popular and financially lucrative All-Star game for this summer. However, in light of the highly restrictive Jim Crow-like law recently passed by the State of Georgia, MLB announced that it was moving the game from Atlanta to Denver this year. In response, a large contingency of Republican Senators, including such “moral stalwarts” as Missouri’s Josh Hawley, have stepped to the plate with a metal bat and advised of their intention to pass legislation removing baseball’s antitrust exemption.
I have long advocated for the removal of baseball’s antiquated antitrust exemption. But it would be terribly ironic if the reason this finally occurs is because of the very folks who have blindly protected MLB all these years and refused to remove the exemption. An additional irony is that such a move would undoubtedly enhance the claims by minor leaguers for minimum wage and overtime pay – principles that most Republicans have fought against at every turn, including specifically with respect to minor league baseball players.
While I still hope that the antitrust exemption is eliminated, and that minor league players are paid a fair wage, I wish an outrageous voting restriction law wasn’t the impetus for it. I don’t really like the fact that MLB might have to pay a huge price for trying, surprisingly, to do the right thing, even though this injustice and correction is long overdue.
