Antitrust Exemption In Jeopardy Bill Chugs Forward To Remove Baseball’s Preferred Status

Congress moved a step closer Thursday to limiting the exemption from federal antitrust laws enjoyed by baseball’s team owners for 73 years.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted, 9-8, to approve a bill that would repeal the owners’ antitrust exemption in labor relations matters. The measure now can be considered by the full Senate. The bill would have to be approved by both the Senate and the House of Representatives to be enacted, but Thursday was a significant step because it marked the first time the Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a measure to repeal the baseball exemption.

The House Judiciary Committee approved similar legislation last fall, but that bill never made it to a vote on the House floor.

The bill, in effect “declares that major league baseball can no longer operate above the law,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt… . “(And) Congress will be doing its part in helping ensure that baseball fans, cities, vendors and the country do not have to suffer through another extended work stoppage.”

Several senators voted for the bill despite deep reservations, including their uncertainty over its effects on minor league baseball.

The bipartisan bill, written by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the committee chairman, incorporates features from competing approaches that previously had divided even advocates of ending baseball’s 73-year-old antitrust exemption.

Under Hatch’s bill, termination of the exemption would not affect the minor leagues, the amateur draft or the owners’ ability to make collective decisions on franchise relocation or their ability to negotiate collectively and share revenue from television rights.

Hatch and other critics of the exemption - granted in 1922 by a now widely criticized Supreme Court ruling - contend that it has given owners an unfair bargaining advantage over the players. The proposed bill would basically affect only labor relations and allow the players’ union to sue in federal court to block unilaterally implemented changes in work conditions.

“This is about workers’ rights,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass. “It’s time to take action.”

Hatch said the bill would “contribute to constructive labor relations between players and owners and will subject major league baseball to the same treatment under the nation’s laws that other professional sports experience.”

He also argued the bill does not represent the imposition of a “big-government solution” to baseball’s never-ending labor problems.

Rather, Hatch said, his bill would “get government out of the way by eliminating a serious, government-made obstacle to resolution of the labor difficulties in baseball.”

Hatch was referring to the 1922 Supreme Court ruling, which held that professional baseball was not a business engaged in interstate commerce and therefore was immune from antitrust laws.

In another decision 50 years later, the same court called that immunity an “aberration” and urged Congress to remedy matters.

Since then, however, team owners have repeatedly beat back attempts to do so. But baseball’s recent labor strife - there is still no collective bargaining agreement despite an eight-month strike by the Major League Baseball Players Association that began last Aug. 12 - and the ongoing refusal of owners to select a commissioner have clearly reinvigorated Congressional resolve to revisit the issue.