Poll: 2022 MLB season

[BobbyStrawberry]

Originally Posted by BobC

What likely really needs to be done is to have the MLB exemption from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 finally removed. It is actually the 100th anniversary this year of the SCOTUS decision that gave them the exemption, as an indirect result of the original federal lawsuit filed by the Federal League back in 1915. The then defunct Baltimore Terrapins team from that Federal League filed a subsequent suit against MLB that eventually resulted in the Supreme Court's 1922 decision to exempt MLB from the provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, granting them the ability to act as an unrestricted monopoly to the detriment of potential competitors and employees (players) for the past 100 years.

There is actually a suit pending right now against MLB attacking the anti-trust exemption, and specifically against Manfred I believe as the defendant, brought by four minor league clubs that lost their ML team affiliations back in 2020 when MLB did an overall contraction of their minor league teams and system, to the detriment of many minor league teams and owners. And this isn't the first and only challenge to the exemption, the most recent being in 2012, in a case that ended up being settled out of court apparently. Also, MLB is the only one of the four major US sports to enjoy such an exemption, which makes absolutely no sense as to why at all. The fact that Landis was the presiding federal judge in the initial case brought against MLB by the Federal League back in 1915, that ended up going nowhere under Landis' control, obviously had nothing to do with his payoff......errrrrr, subsequent totally independent hiring as MLB's first ever Commissioner a few years later, at an extreme increase in salary over what he made as a federal judge, and what I believe may have even been higher than the salary of any MLB player at that time. And of course, his having been a federal judge and likely being well acquainted and friends with other federal judges, including maybe some on the SCOTUS, would have just been another coincidence of this hiring, right?

Without such exemption/immunity, MLB might have been forced to act a bit differently over the years, and maybe we aren't in this current situation? Who really knows.

Thanks for this, Bob. I didn't know all of this background.