By Brent Kendall | The New York Times
The San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals on Thursday said baseball’s exemption was “one of federal law’s most enduring anomalies” and ruled that only Congress or the Supreme Court could change it.
“Like Casey, San Jose has struck out here,” Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in a ruling from a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel.
Baseball is the only sport with an antitrust exemption, which frees the league, at least in some circumstances, from laws that restrict firms in other industries from engaging in anticompetitive restraints of trade. Today one primary benefit to MLB is that it can rely upon the exemption in blocking teams from moving.
