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(December 20, 2021, 11:30 AM EST) -- Major League Baseball and its franchises illegally conspired to scrap 40 minor league clubs, according to a lawsuit Monday that aims to end the baseball antitrust exemption granted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1922.

Four minor league clubs filed suit in Manhattan federal court challenging the MLB's controversial 2019 decision to contract the minor league system from 160 teams to 120. The teams — former affiliates of the New York Yankees, Houston Astros, San Francisco Giants and Detroit Tigers — said this was a horizontal agreement between the MLB and its 30 franchises that violates the Sherman Act.

For nearly 100 years, the Supreme Court's decision in Federal Baseball Club v. National League has shielded MLB from Sherman Act claims. But the minor league teams said that the high court's June ruling in NCAA v. Alston, which found that the NCAA is not exempt from antitrust scrutiny, has cleared the way for the justices to eliminate baseball's own antitrust carveout.

"The time is at hand to cast the baseball exemption into the dustbin of antitrust history," wrote the minor league clubs in Monday's complaint.

In a Monday interview with Law360, the team's lawyers from Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP and Berg & Androphy said they will quickly try to kick the case up to the high court.

"Baseball should be put on the same footing as all the other major sports and should have to deal with the ins and outs of the competition laws of the United States," said Berg & Androphy's Jim Quinn.