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Baseball got free pass from antitrust laws in 1922

By (Breaking Legal News)

Football may be the nation's most popular sport, but baseball is the favored game with the Supreme Court, which gave the national pastime an exemption from antitrust laws in 1922.

Thirty-five years later, the court refused to grant one to the National Football League, saying, essentially, that the court muffed that first call but that it was up to Congress to reverse it.

Now, the NFL is back before the high court, hoping to get at least some relief from what it says are frivolous antitrust lawsuits. The case centers on a challenge to the league's exclusive headwear merchandise contract with Reebok, but the league is hoping for a more sweeping ruling, should the court take the case.

Baseball's exemption is so old it was granted when the sport was still often spelled as two words, in a case called Federal Base Ball Club of Baltimore v. National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs. In a lawsuit, the Baltimore franchise of the old Federal League, by then defunct, claimed that the 16 teams in the National League and American League violated antitrust laws by purchasing or otherwise inducing Federal League teams to leave the league.

But the court ruled unanimously that baseball wasn't covered by federal antitrust law.

"The business is giving exhibitions of base ball, which are purely state affairs," wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the court's decision.

In 1953, the court upheld the decision, and in denying football an exemption four years later, elaborated on that 1953 ruling: "The court did this because it was concluded that more harm would be done in overruling Federal Base Ball than in upholding a ruling which, at best, was of dubious validity."

Full post as published by Breaking Legal News on June 30, 2009 (boomark / email).