Federal Baseball Club v. National League

Federal Baseball Club v. National League
L. Ed. 898
Holding
Major League Baseball is not considered interstate commerce under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Court membership
Chief Justice William H. Taft Associate Justices Joseph McKenna · Oliver W. Holmes Jr. William R. Day · Willis Van Devanter Mahlon Pitney · James C. McReynolds Louis Brandeis · John H. Clarke
Case opinion
Majority	Holmes, joined by unanimous
Laws applied
Sherman Antitrust Act

Federal Baseball Club v. National League, 259 U.S. 200 (1922), is a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Sherman Antitrust Act did not apply to Major League Baseball.

Background

After the

Judgment

Court of Appeals

The Court of Appeals reversed the trial verdict, and held that baseball was not subject to the Sherman Act. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court

In a unanimous decision written by Justice

for the purposes of the Sherman Act. Justice Holmes' decision was as follows:

The decision of the Court of Appeals went to the root of the case, and, if correct, makes it unnecessary to consider other serious difficulties in the way of the plaintiff's recovery. A summary statement of the nature of the business involved will be enough to present the point. The clubs composing the Leagues are in different cities and for the most part in different states. The end of the elaborate organizations and sub-organizations that are described in the pleadings and evidence is that these clubs shall play against one another in public exhibitions for money, one or the other club crossing a state line in order to make the meeting possible. When, as the result of these contests, one club has won the pennant of its league and another club has won the pennant of the other league, there is a final competition for the world's championship between these two. Of course, the scheme requires constantly repeated traveling on the part of the clubs, which is provided for, controlled, and disciplined by the organizations, and this, it is said, means commerce among the states. But we are of opinion that the Court of Appeals was right.

The business is giving exhibitions of baseball, which are purely state affairs. It is true that, in order to attain for these exhibitions the great popularity that they have achieved, competitions must be arranged between clubs from different cities and states. But the fact that, in order to give the exhibitions, the Leagues must induce free persons to cross state lines and must arrange and pay for their doing so is not enough to change the character of the business. According to the distinction insisted upon in Hooper v. California, 155 U. S. 648, 155 U. S. 655, the transport is a mere incident, not the essential thing. That to which it is incident, the exhibition, although made for money, would not be called trade of commerce in the commonly accepted use of those words. As it is put by defendant, personal effort not related to production is not a subject of commerce. That which in its consummation is not commerce does not become commerce among the states because the transportation that we have mentioned takes place. To repeat the illustrations given by the court below, a firm of lawyers sending out a member to argue a case, or the Chautauqua lecture bureau sending out lecturers, does not engage in such commerce because the lawyer or lecturer goes to another state.

If we are right, the plaintiff's business is to be described in the same way, and the restrictions by contract that prevented the plaintiff from getting players to break their bargains and the other conduct charged against the defendants were not an interference with commerce among the states.

Significance

This case is the main reason why MLB has not faced any competitor leagues since 1922, and MLB, to date, remains the only American sports league with such an antitrust exemption.^[2][3]

The case was reaffirmed in Toolson v. New York Yankees, Inc.^[4]

In Flood v. Kuhn, the Court partially reversed, and found Major League Baseball to be engaged in interstate commerce. However, the justices refused to overturn baseball's original antitrust exemption from Federal Baseball, deeming it necessary to preserve precedent: in addition to Toolson, the case had already been heavily cited in Shubert, International Boxing, and Radovich.^[5]

In 2016's

, that] manage[s] to survive indefinitely even when surrounded by a sea of contrary law…. [that] would never expand but would, if anything, wash away with the tides of time".^[6]

See also