Amicus Brief - Tri-City Valleycats Inc. v. The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 23, 2023
CONTACT: Ashley Woolheater, woolheater@openmarketsinstitute.org
“This exemption allows baseball to collude against minor-league players and cap their salaries at poverty levels, while arbitrarily denying teams to cities and towns."
WASHINGTON – The Open Markets Institute has filed an amicus brief in Tri-City Valley Cats v. The Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, urging the Supreme Court to take the case and end baseball’s century-old antitrust exemption, which has allowed Major League Baseball to exert monopoly-like control over major and minor league players and teams. The brief was authored by Open Markets Legal Director Sandeep Vaheesan and antitrust attorney Jim Himes.
“This exemption, which was created by the Court and not by Congress, rested on shaky foundations from the beginning. Over time, the basis for preserving this exemption has only grown weaker as baseball became a multi-billion-dollar national business and the Supreme Court expanded Congress’s authority to regulate ‘interstate commerce,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, Open Markets Legal Director and one of the authors of the brief.
“Taking advantage of this exemption, Major League Baseball (MLB) engages in collusive conduct that is particularly injurious to minor league baseball—its players, team owners, and small towns and cities that host and cherish their teams, often literally the only professional sports team in town,” Vaheesan said.
In this case, the two teams that filed suit had their minor league affiliation terminated by MLB in late 2020, meaning they could no longer field the best players nor compete against the top minor league teams.
Vaheesan also penned an op-ed in the Boston Globe on the problems with baseball’s exemption, writing “this exemption allows baseball to collude against minor-league players and cap their salaries at poverty levels, while arbitrarily denying teams to cities and towns.”
“The benefits of ending the exemption are likely to be substantial: Dozens of small towns could get their teams back, minor league players could obtain compensation after years of collusion against them, scouts could see teams competing for their services, and fans could watch more games played outside their home markets. The time has come for the high court to kill the century-old zombie,” Vaheesan wrote in the Globe.
Read full brief below or download here.
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The Open Markets Institute is a team of journalists, researchers, lawyers, economists, and advocates working together to expose and reverse the stranglehold that corporate monopolies have on our country. Learn more at www.openmarketsinstitute.org.