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Now This is what Congressional testimony Should Sound Like

By Rick Karcher, Michael McCann, Geoffrey Rapp, Greg Skidmore, and Howard Wasserman

Back in the day, it was not necessary for committee members to attack sport-related witnesses to derive humor and entertainment from the hearing. It was enough to invite Casey Stengel to testify, as the Senate Antirust and Monopoly Subcommittee did in a 1958 hearing on Major League Baseball's Antitrust Exemption.

It gives you exchanges such as this:
Senator Kefauver: Mr. Stengel, I am not sure that I made my question clear. (Laughter).

Mr. Stengel: Yes, sir. Well that is all right. I am not sure I am going to answer yours perfectly either. (Laughter)

Senator Kefauver: I was asking you, sir, why it is that baseball wants this bill passed.

Mr. Stengel: I would say I would not know, but would say the reason why they would want it passed is to keep baseball going as the highest paid ball sport that has gone into baseball and from the baseball angle, I am not going to speak of any other sport. I am not here to argue about other sports, I am in the baseball business. It has been run cleaner than any business that was ever put out in the one-hundred years at the present time. I am not speaking about television or I am not speaking about income that comes into the ball parks: You have to take that off. I don't know too much about it. I say the ballplayers have a better advancement at the present time.

Read the whole thing, especially when the next witness (Mickey Mantle) is questioned.

(H/T: A Dream or a Song)

Full post as published by Sports Law Blog on February 14, 2008 (boomark / email).