Elktonnick

You may find the following article in Constitution Daily written November 21, 2021 interesting: On November 9, 1953, the United States Supreme Court upheld a prior, controversial decision that allowed major league baseball to operate outside of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The one-paragraph, per-curium opinion left in place a decision from 1922 from the Court that found that baseball, at its highest level, was an exhibition and not subject to the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Back in 2008, baseball fan and current Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito explained the unique circumstances in Federal Baseball Club v. National League, that unanimous decision from 1922 that has received some criticism over the years. “Of all the Court’s antitrust cases, the Federal Baseball case may well be the most widely known, but what most people know about the case is not quite accurate,” Alito told an audience at the Supreme Court Historical Society. Alito did acknowledge the legal critics who slammed three Court decisions about the baseball antitrust exemption, and especially the Federal Baseball Club opinion from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “It has been pilloried pretty consistently in the legal literature since at least the 1940s,” Alito said, referring to Holmes’ conclusion that “the business is giving exhibitions of base ball, which are purely state affairs" and outside of interstate commerce regulations. Alito believed the Federal Baseball Club decision fit with the Court’s logic at the time and it wasn’t the product of a baseball-loving court, as some critics have suggested. “In 1922, the Court saw the Commerce Power as a limited power that did not extend to all ‘economic . . . activities that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.’ This approach forced the Court to draw fine—some would say arbitrary—lines,” Alito concluded. The 1953 case at the Court, Toolson v. New York Yankees, was the first attempt to get the Court to reverse the precedent of Federal Baseball. The one-paragraph opinion said that Congress was the best arena to settle the issue, and not the Supreme Court. “The business has thus been left for thirty years to develop, on the understanding that it was not subject to existing antitrust legislation. The present cases ask us to overrule the prior decision and, with retrospective effect, hold the legislation applicable. We think that if there are evils in this field which now warrant application to it of the antitrust laws it should be by legislation,” the Court concluded. But two Justices attached dissents. Justice Harold Burton said that “Congress, however, has enacted no express exemption of organized baseball from the Sherman Act, and no court has demonstrated the existence of an implied exemption from that Act of any sport that is so highly organized as to amount to an interstate monopoly or which restrains interstate trade or commerce.” The issue came back to the Court a second time for reconsideration in Flood v. Kuhn from 1972, when Curt Flood challenged baseball’s “reserve clause” that kept players from being free agents. In the Flood decision, a 5-3 majority said that baseball was indeed subject to commerce regulations, but the subject’s history compelled Congress – and not the Court – to take action to regulate baseball’s business activities. Justice Harry Blackmun’s colorful majority opinion is still talked about today. Using flowery language, Blackmun finally concluded “that the remedy, if any is indicated, is for congressional, and not judicial, action.” The decision upheld the antitrust exemption. Justice William O. Douglas dissented, even though he signed on to the Toolson decision back in 1953. “While I joined the Court's opinion in Toolson v. New York Yankee, Inc., I have lived to regret it; and I would now correct what I believe to be its fundamental error,” Douglas said. In June 2017, a challenge to the baseball antitrust exemption failed in the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court, when a group of former minor-league baseball players sought compensation for what they felt were low wages forced on them by major league player contract standards. The three-person panel cited the three Supreme Court decisions as precedents about the antitrust exemption. Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center. Filed Under: Supreme Court

You answered your own question.

I think you have right. It is obviously easier for 30 owners to achieve consensus than 1200 plus players. This point has also been made by Sherman and others. Time is short if one wishes the season to begin on time.

Joel Sherman just made the point that they have been at it for 42 days. So is that early in the negotiations when Spring Training is so close and the proposed start of the season is less than two months away? If the players say no to an impartial federal mediator, are they really interested in a negotiated settlement or are they too fractured themselves to agree on anything? No conclusions on my part just questions.

The players will be blamed if they refuse to accept federal mediation. The details of any proposal is secondary at this point to the basic issue of accepting a federal.mediator or not. The players will lose any moral high ground if they refuse a federal mediator especially in this climate. They would be well advised to agree to mediation.

If you need your baseball fix, let me suggest the Caribbean series on ESPN Deprtes

No it is a statement of fact in this case.

You do not know the alleged substance yet you readily condemn someone without proof.

You are condemning someone for alleging testing positive for an unknown substance. Talk about the absence of proof. Why not just admit you just do not like Ortiz regardless.

You are entitled to your own opinion but not your your own facts. The facts are that there is no proof that Ortiz took anything prohibited by MLB rules to say otherwise publicly could be deemed both libelous and slander.

Accusations are just that accusations. One can accuse anyone of anything but without proof and due process, accusations are meaningless. Everyone has the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise through a fair hearing with due process. Since none of that happened in Ortiz's case then the accusations against him can rightly be dismissed as slander.

Speaking of Shaughnessy the auto correct changed it to " Shady uneasy" I think that says it all! LOL

Google Sherman Anti Trust Act of 1890 to begin your education of the history of Anti Trust legislation in the United States.

If you did, that ain't cricket.

My father who was a very good ballplayer in his day in the 1920s and 30s told me of a game they used to play when there were not enough players to field two teams. It was called scrub. It was a variant of cricket and baseball. There were only two bases.

Not as much as a Yorker off stump for a duck!

I agree. Cricket is going to be the next big thing because the cricket power structure has the imagination to make their game more viewer friendly. BTW since the lockout, I have been watching a lot of cricket on Willow. I have gotten to appreciate the game a lot more. MLB could learn a lot from cricket especially the way cricket handles its video reviews.

What you don't know about cricket is breathtaking. First of all, what you are describing are the traditional 5 day test matches between countries such as the annual Ashes match between England and Australia. That is red ball cricket. Today there is white ball cricket which are limited over matches that can last anywhere from 2 to three hours. (An over consists of six balls or pitches) These matches are very spectator friendly and are widely popular in the cricket world which is most of South Asia and the Commonwealth countries with a combined population of nearly 2 billion people. Since the introduction of white ball cricket there has arisen several cricket professional leagues including the Indian Premier League as well as the introduction of the ODI or one day international a limited over match of anywhere between 20 or 50 overs. As to ODI cricket's worldwide television appeal, Forbes magazine noted that the match between India and Pakistan was outdrawn by only the England Italy European Cup final in 2020 and would outdraw the Super bowl. Cricket may never appeal to an American audience, but it has become big television business drawing huge audiences around the world. Once the pandemic is over who knows I wouldn't be surprised if John Henry and Fenway Sports group doesn't try to add an IPL franchise to their portfolio to go along with their other properties. I think the IPL has greater growth opportunity than MLB.

I have Willow on my cable TV. Willow is the international cricket channel. Cricket is huge in India. The Indian cricket league is the next new big thing. Once this pandemic is over Cricket will explode. It will rival the NBA as the next international money maker. MLB simply does not have the marketing future and growth potential that these other sports have.

Atlanta United has better attendance than Seattle. Atlanta United has the 9th best attendance in the world (43000) just behind premier league West Ham but ahead of Athletico de Madrid. The average value of an MLS franchise is now over 500 million, in 2019 it was 300 million. The Los Angeles franchise is worth nearly a billion. MLS is seeing rapid growth in franchise valuation.

That was the way it used to be. The Royal Rooters were led by Michael T. McGreevy, nicknamed "Nuf Ced", owner of the 3rd Base Saloon in Boston. While McGreevy was certainly the spiritual (in both libations and foundations) leader of the Royal Rooters, Mayor of Boston John F. Fitzgerald, the maternal grandfather of John F. Kennedy, served as chairman for a while, and during that time, M. J. Regan was the secretary. Other members included C. J. Lavis, L. Watson, T. S. Dooley, J. Keenan, and W. Cahill, among others. On game days the Royal Rooters marched in procession from the 3rd Base Saloon to the Huntington Avenue Grounds, which was the team's home field before Fenway Park opened in 1912. The Rooters had a reserved section of seats along the third base line, close enough to the field to intimidate or distract opposing players with their insults and vicious taunts. The 1912 World Series went down in Rooter history as the Rooters' seats on “Duffy's Cliff” were sold to other fans; the Rooters became angry and mounted police were called in to stop the riot.

Haven't you heard we are in a global economy. The NBA is more concerned with what the Chinese government thinks than what the average American fan thinks. I believe MLB owners are much the same. They are thinking more about opportunity costs on a global scale than you give them credit for.

What is more enlightening is that I believe the Premier League and football (soccer) in general shows more growth potential in the near term than does American baseball, at least that's what the international investment community is thinking.

Please enlighten us which of John Henry's business ventures are more worthy of his focus than either Liverpool or the Red Sox.

I recently read that Forbes valued Liverpool as being a more valuable franchise than the Red Sox. So if you were John Henry where would you focus more of your attention ? Where is there more growth potential in Premier League Football or Major League Baseball?