Why is baseball exempt from antitrust laws

For MiLB, such a decision would potentially carry much larger ramifications. While MLB players contracts, free agency and other rights are part of a collectively bargained agreement between the owners and players, non man roster players in MiLB are not part of any union. Their contract rights are dictated by MLB, something possible because of the antitrust exemption. Without that exemption, such restrictions would be subject to lawsuits on unfair restraint of trade.

Without the antitrust exemption, the current structure where MLB owns the contractual rights to players and then sends them to minor league teams would be legally tenuous. It would likely require a new agreement where minor league players agree to such a system and the draft in return for concessions in a collectively bargained agreement.

Facebook Twitter Email. What is MLB's antitrust exemption? Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley using baseball's century-old golden goose as political cudgel. LawInSport is not responsible for any actions taken or not taken on the basis of this information.

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Legal Advisors. The outcome of this combination of activity and inactivity is an exemption just for baseball, one that is now nearly a century old. How can we explain the persistence of such a weird state of affairs? The most common explanation emphasizes the unique position of baseball in American culture. Judges and legislators have bent over backwards, the argument goes, to protect the national pastime.

It is a story in which a sophisticated business organization has been able to work the levers of the legal system to achieve a result favored by almost no one else.

For all the well-known foibles of the owners of major league baseball teams, baseball has consistently received and followed smart antitrust advice from sharp lawyers, all the way back to the s, when the sport faced its first antitrust crisis.

At the same time, it is a story that serves as an arresting reminder of the path-dependent nature of the legal system. At each step, judges and legislators made decisions that were perfectly sensible when considered one at a time, but this series of decisions yielded an outcome that makes no sense at all.