Baseball’s Anticompetitive Antitrust Exemption

For more than one hundred years, professional baseball has enjoyed a form of exemption from federal antitrust laws. Arising from a statement made by the game’s first commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis that organized baseball is a national institution and not labor—and later enshrined into common law by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s adoption of a now-outdated definition of interstate commerce—baseball’s antitrust exemption endures as “an exception, an anomaly and an aberration.”

Relying on an exemption from antitrust law, owners of Major League Baseball have become exceedingly wealthy based on their carte blanche freedom to act in their collective best interests—sometimes to the detriment of players, rival sports leagues, and fans. Even though the original basis for baseball’s antitrust exemption has long since faded, courts and Congress, fearing political backlash or perhaps enjoying the perks of aggressive lobbyists seeking to curry favor, have been loath to lift the exemption.

This Article calls for reform to the treatment of professional baseball under federal antitrust laws and suggests that baseball, like all other organized sports, be held subject to competitive scrutiny. Drawing on a careful study of baseball history, legal precedent, and public policy, the Article concludes that even if organized baseball is a national institution, much like its historic use of amateur players, unbalanced schedules, and segregated leagues, the time has come to put baseball’s historic antitrust exemption behind us.