CCSU Specialist on Baseball and Antitrust Predicts Legal and Political Fallout from League Contraction

The move by Major League Baseball owners to eliminate two teams from the league next season due to a mix of economic woes and lack of fan support has created a political and legal minefield, according to Dr. Jerold Duquette, assistant professor of political science at CCSU and author of Regulating the National Pastime: Baseball and Antitrust.

As the league prepares to announce which of its 30 teams will face the ax, politics could prove to be a stumbling block, especially if Congress has anything to say about it, said Duquette.

Bills introduced in the Senate by Paul Wellstone (D-MN) and in the House by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, would seek to remove part of Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption, which currently allows owners to control minor league baseball and the movement of teams from one city to another. Sen. Wellstone hopes to use his bill as leverage to protect his hometown team, the Minnesota Twins, from contraction. “The legislators believe that by removing this aspect of the exemption, the eliminated teams would have a cause of action against MLB,” stated Duquette.

“Of course, opponents of the exemption have been trying to eliminate it legislatively for more than half a century,” said Duquette. “Congress has debated legislation that would roll back the exemption created by the Supreme Court’s infamous 1922 Federal Baseball decision, which shielded MLB from antitrust liability, for years,” he said. The only significant exception, Duquette explained, was a 1998 law signed by President Clinton exposing MLB to antitrust liability in labor negotiation matters. “This legislative weakening was the result of negotiations between the owners and players. The owners agreed to go along with the partial repeal to appease the players and preserve the more important aspects of the exemption, namely MLB’s freedom to control the minor leagues and make relocation decisions without antitrust exposure,” said Duquette.

He predicted that the legislative bills currently under consideration will not be well received in Congress, “because as they are currently drafted they include language removing the exemption for relocation decision, most unpopular in areas where major or minor teams are located. Ironically, the Minnesota senator proposing the bill is trying to save his own team, but in the long run the language of the bill will make it easier for his beloved Minnesota Twins to leave town.”

“The bill will surely languish and die eventually,” predicted Duquette. “There may be some additional fireworks, but the actual bill has no chance.”

Duquette’s is the only book-length study of baseball’s antitrust exemption, and the only study that utilizes a comprehensive methodological approach to understand the persistence of what has become known as the “baseball anomaly.” Major League Baseball, alone among industries of its size in the United States, operates as an unregulated monopoly. Duquette explains the baseball anomaly by connecting baseball’s regulatory status to the larger political environment, tracing the game’s fate through four different regulatory regimes. He maintains that institutional, ideological, and political factors within each regulatory regime provided the context for the survival of the baseball anomaly.

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