How to get a better baseball
How to get a better baseball
Part 5 of "Toward a Better Baseball"
During MLB’s 2023-24 offseason, I am posting a series of essays titled “Toward a Better Baseball.” The goal of the series is to articulate a vision for the sport for when MLB loses its monopoly power. This is the fifth and final part. Read the preceding installments here.
The Angelos family that owns the Baltimore Orioles told Maryland governor Wes Moore late last year that they were not selling the team, a pledge that secured them a lease renewal to Camden Yards and $600 million in taxpayer dollars to renovate the ballpark. Weeks later, the Angelos sold the Orioles to private equity vultures in a manner that avoids capital gains taxes on the $1.7 billion transaction. Moore called the sale “disappointing,” which is another way of saying “I’m the elected leader of a whole ass state and I can’t do anything about being lied to and my coffers being raided.” MLB owners get what they want because they have power, and they have power because they preside over a popular, closed, and monopolistic sports league.
I’ve written thousands of words about the league’s antitrust exemption and what baseball should look like. That doesn’t mean I have power to do anything about it. I’m just a self-righteous bozo from South Jersey, an idea man with a computer and without an army. One of those ideas is that we should shoot for the moon—the unconditional repeal of MLB’s antitrust exemption—and accept the small, frustrating, and important steps toward the ultimate goal: professional baseball being more competitive and in turn more compelling. Hopefully, people with power are listening.
“Toward a Better Baseball” was informed in part by a lifetime of watching pointless ball games. As a kid, I religiously watched the mid-to-late 90s Philadelphia Phillies, something no parent should have allowed. I was later radicalized by the 2021-22 MLB lockout, but the series’ direct inspiration was my new Premier League fandom.
It amazes me to watch bad teams play their asses off and even improve their rosters mid-season; Nottingham Forest, desperate to avoid relegation, recently signed American soccer star Gio Reyna from German powerhouse Borussia Dortmund. Every year in MLB several teams are bad on purpose, knowing that profits are assured by the league structure. The irony of former NFL coach Herm Edwards’ infamous “You play to win the game” tirade is that, in closed American sports leagues, you do not play to win the game, or at least you don’t have to to make money.
Thinking about how to make MLB more competitive, my grand ideas kept running into the antitrust exemption. There was no way around it, and the best way out is through, so I proposed a four-point vision for professional baseball without a monopoly:
It should be allowed everywhere;
It should be affordable and accessible across media;
It should have relegation and promotion; and,
It should fairly compensate its unionized workforce.
MLB has implemented tweaks to make the game more interesting for more fans, such as expanded playoffs and rules to promote good, young players faster, but these are cosmetic adjustments to structural problems. Sure, the new playoff format allowed for madcap runs to the World Series by the Phillies and Arizona Diamondbacks the last two years, but the Oakland Athletics and Chicago White Sox still exist. Their neglectful owners will subject us to six desultory games between the two teams this season.
Author Mike Davis once told me that before he had a family he wanted to be a revolutionary, and I too have fantasies of being part of a popular revolt from the barricades, the ones out in left. A fan strike would bring MLB and its monopoly to its knees, and so would the Major League Baseball Players Association joining Shawn Fain’s general strike, and so would an all-out voter mobilization to get leftists in national positions of power to outlaw monopolies and closed sports leagues. Are such actions imminent or even likely? No. So while I curse reformists in theory, I am one in practice, and I believe incremental wins will ultimately lead to the demise of the antitrust exemption. (Just don’t tell Marx, please.)
A good place to start is with the people most impacted by MLB’s antitrust exemption, its workers. The key here is the MLBPA gaining leverage to chip away at the exemption’s labor impacts, which include keeping some of the best players out of the major leagues. In politics, leverage is another word for power, and power stems from either people or money. The players will never be as rich as the owners, so they must rely on the solidarity of the MLBPA, which has long been one of the country’s most powerful and effective unions. One way to gain more leverage, then, is to grow the union’s membership.
Fed up with the substandard working and living conditions in Minor League Baseball, minor leaguers voted in 2022 to unionize with the MLBPA. The union gained thousands of new members and a base to reform the minors-to-majors pipeline rife with exploitation and wage theft. The power of the move was made clear when MLB voluntarily recognized the minor leaguers’ action rather than force the players to take an election to the National Labor Relations Board. The Senate had opened yet another inquiry into MLB’s antitrust exemption, and the league couldn’t risk galvanizing the players further or putting labor issues into the political sphere, for that could snowball into legislation against the league’s interests. The 1994-95 players strike, for example, eventually led to the Curt Flood Act of 1998, which reapplied antitrust laws to major league employment.
At the same time, MLB keeping labor issues at the collective bargaining table and outside the halls of government reaffirms their power. The owners don’t have to worry about top players leaving for a different league because none exist. Another league can’t exist due to MLB’s monopoly. This gives the league much leverage over the players in labor negotiations. It’s a chess match that will continue until other major leagues are possible or climate change makes earth uninhabitable, whichever comes first. Until then, we who want a better baseball need to figure out how to add people power to the players’ side. I’ve long thought that MLBPA can better communicate how the players’ interests align with those of the fans.
As writer Adam Johnson discussed on the podcast Tipping Pitches, how fans think about and how the media talks about sports is anti-labor, wittingly or not. Multimillion dollar contracts are often mocked by reducing them to some meaningless ratio like earnings-per-home run, and the blame for underachieving teams often gets placed on players who are considered overpaid. “Ultimately,” Johnson said, “the richest player in any sport is… making more money for some faceless, 80-year-old fucking billionaire with a pink face who funds anti-abortion candidates.” If you think this is hyperbole, then look up Dick Monfort.
That’s not to say communications are more effective than federal legislation or that legislation shouldn’t be prioritized. Exhibit A is the Curt Flood Act, and since MLB was awarded its monopoly in 1922 countless bills have been introduced to roll back some or all of the antitrust exemption. But for as long the issue has had the attention of Congress, little has changed about the anti-competitive nature of the league. At this point, it's a playbook they must teach freshman congress members at orientation: MLB does something stupid, a panel convenes, a member sends a stern letter to the league, they drag the commissioner to a hearing, then they introduce a bill, dead on arrival, to limit or eliminate the antitrust exemption.
California Representative Barbara Lee was the latest to carry out the tradition, this time in response to the Athletics owner’s bad faith negotiations to stay in Oakland. As well-intentioned as the maneuver is, it shows how the antitrust exemption is more politically useful alive than dead. Politicians can vilify it, showing constituents that they’re holding big business accountable, while at the same time they don’t do any real political organizing against it, for team owners might screw their constituency (or careers).
To be clear, I don’t fault Lee. Oakland is getting particularly screwed by the A’s, and members of Congress can provide real leverage. Florida congressional representatives opened an inquiry into the antitrust exemption and basically made MLB create the Tampa Bay Rays after the owners blocked the San Francisco Giants move to St. Petersburg in the 90s. It’s just that it’s highly unlikely the antitrust exemption will go down in a gladiatorial battle on the Senate floor, to the extent that that’s possible in the geriatric chamber.
When the political heat gets dialed up too high, MLB deploys its time-tested lobbying apparatus, which features threats of team relocation and bankruptcy. Red or blue, no elected official wants to be held responsible by voters for the loss of a beloved team, and no member of congress representing a prospective MLB market—today, that’s Las Vegas, Nashville, and Charlotte, among others—would vote for a bill that imperils their chance at getting a major league team. When all else fails, the league just awards a franchise, like they did with the Rays.
A more likely legislative scenario would be limiting the scope of MLB’s monopoly a chunk at a time. It probably won’t be long until minor leaguers demand that antitrust laws also get reapplied to them, but even then it won’t be a standalone triumph like the Curt Flood Act. Instead, a wily pro-union congress member with some juice will slip reforms into an omnibus bill that Congress will have to pass to avoid a fiscal emergency of its own making. If this happens enough times, then on my deathbed and during the presidency of one of Joe Biden’s great grandkids the last vestige of the antitrust exemption will fall and this blog will at long last be vindicated.
It’s also more likely that legislation will pass that generally strengthens worker rights or advances progressive economic policy or, God willing, caps the price of Bud Light at ballparks. I think this is especially true if support continues to grow for workers and unions. These would be indirect shots at MLB’s antitrust exemption, but they’d nonetheless weaken the position of the owners. As power is taken from them in one regard, owners become weaker overall, exposing their flanks to other attacks.
States can also play a role in governing sports, as California has shown. Its 2019 law to allow college athletes to profit off their name, image, and likeness effectively became the law everywhere, since athletic programs outside of California would be at a clear recruiting disadvantage. This has sent the NCAA into an existential tailspin. Athletes can now earn money for their labor, and they don’t have to share the earnings with school administrations and league executives—the horror!
Another bill, which cleared the State Assembly but not the Senate, would have required athletic programs to share their revenues with the athletes who generate that revenue. The Denver Post called the proposal “radical,” which is an interesting way to say “fair,” and it set off a lobbying frenzy. It too would have spread like wildfire.
To be honest, I’m not sure what exactly California could do to drive a trojan horse into MLB’s monopoly because I have a day job and it’s not as an antitrust lawyer. The NCAA acts like a monopoly in many ways, and it’s been battered by several antitrust lawsuits, but it’s not expressly exempt from antitrust laws like MLB is. For instance, California couldn’t reapply antitrust rules to the teams within its borders because it doesn’t have jurisdiction, but there must be some way that the state’s economic and political might can be brought to bear to loosen MLB’s stranglehold on professional baseball. There’s a congresswoman from the Bay Area who would be interested in this.
Besides collective bargaining and legislation, the courts are the other avenue through which to reform MLB, although this has been the least fruitful.
In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled in Federal Baseball v. National League that MLB’s product is not interstate commerce under the Sherman Antitrust Act, thus exempting the league from the law’s purview. In 1953, a player named George Toolson challenged the league’s reserve clause, and by extension its antitrust exemption, and lost. The exemption was again upheld almost twenty years later in Flood v. Kuhn. Each of these cases is littered with inconsistencies and inanities.
Enthralled by the major league defendants, the Court determined in Federal Baseball that games are exhibitions whose interstate commerce is incidental, and not essential, to the nature of the game and thus not subject to antitrust laws. It made no sense then and it makes no sense now.
Toolson v. New York Yankees came two years before the Court ruled against an antitrust exemption in boxing and four years before it said the NFL can’t have a monopoly. Chief Justice Earl Warren acknowledged in the boxing case how Toolson made it difficult to reason that other sports leagues shouldn’t have monopolies. One of Warren’s colleagues, the legendary progressive William O. Douglas, came to regret his signing on to the Toolson decision.
Flood v. Kuhn is probably the most dispiriting case. The left-leaning Burger Court took up Curt Flood’s plea for free agency, and in a surprise to most observers the justices not only deferred to precedent, but also said it’s Congress’s job to undo the antitrust exemption that the Court awarded in the first place. Democrats have become disillusioned with the Supreme Court this century, what with Bush v. Gore and the archconservative Roberts Court, but SCOTUS has been making shit up for a long time.
In 2021, four minor league teams sued MLB after the league shut them down, and some felt the case had the potential to finally overturn the league’s antitrust exemption. Attorney Jim Quinn represented the plaintiffs and during the 2021-22 lockout appeared on Tipping Pitches to discuss the exemption’s legal history.
As if talking to the Court, Quinn complimented the conservatives’ thoughtful approach to antitrust issues, but cautioned that if the justices were “seriously thinking about overturning Roe v. Wade, I would think that this”—burying Federal Baseball once and for all—“would be a better use of their time if they want to overturn prior cases.” Of course, the ghouls on the Court overturned Roe, and in November last year MLB settled with the teams just before the Court would have considered whether to take the case. A blatant judicial error lives on, but women’s rights don’t. Such is justice in America.
Baseball is still America’s pastime not because of some invented history we share and care about, but because it is the only sport that’s played everyday, which forces us to accept loss. “Ted Williams failed six times out of ten in the greatest season ever for a hitter, and only once, in 1906, did a team lose less than a quarter of its games in a season, with those Chicago Cubs losing four times as much as the NBA’s all-time winningest team,” I wrote in my first essay for Out in Left.
Baseball is a grind, and so is life, with its alarms and commutes and work and a litany of little dramas across professional and personal contexts that are interrupted by a few huge dramas. We remember the good times—Joe Carter’s walk-off World Series home run, say—and try to forget the bad—the grounder through Bill Buckner’s legs, maybe—but most of life is singles and pop-ups, a series of unremarkable moments of us just doing the best we can.
MLB’s antitrust exemption also embodies an enduring American trait: the consolidation of power in the hands of a few. In this case, the MLB team owners maintain 30 monopolies that control all of professional baseball in the U.S. This has marked negative impacts on race, culture, gender, geography, and the workforce. There is no question MLB is the best professional baseball league in the world, but it is not the best it can be, and it is certainly not just or equitable. Articulating a vision for a better baseball therefore articulates a better vision for the country.
In the end, this is all about power—who has it, who wants it, and how it will be used—for all things in life are political, including and especially sports. There is no doubt who has the most power in baseball, but power isn’t static. If enough bozos from South Jersey and wherever else get together, or at least think a little differently, then power will shift to the people who should have it, the people who don’t have $1.7 billion to lie about. In that world, baseball would be for all and the domestic beer would be cheap.