THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 7, 1994 TAG: 9410070034
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A18 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 42 lines
Ken Burns is right, baseball is a metaphor for America. And like many other American enterprises, baseball is now wrangling with Congress about what rules should govern its business.
Prodded by the baseball strike, a House subcommittee voted last week to abolish baseball's exemption from the antitrust laws. With Congress about to leave town, however, few expect the bill to become law this year.
The exemption was codified by the Supreme Court in 1922, at the behest of the New York Yankees, some say. The Yankees gained their predominance shortly after the ruling.
Antitrust laws in general tend to be a remedy for a situation that does not occur in a properly functioning marketplace. As Robert Bork pointed out in his book The Antitrust Paradox, competition usually crushes any monopoly or cartel.
Baseball's exemption, though, helped create a government-enforced cartel, with special conditions that help it resist the forces of the marketplace and alter its labor/management relations. The exemption should be abolished.
Both owners and players, it should be pointed out, have benefited handsomely from the current arrangement. Abolishing the antitrust exemption would not guarantee any settlement of the strike. All it would do is allow the disputants to engage in another national pastime: suing each other.
That this would be popular in a Congress filled with more lawyers than the O.J. Simpson trial is not surprising. Lawmakers believe in the courtroom as a temple as much as Burns does the diamond.
The exemption should be repealed. But given what is now happening in hockey, where players are locked out even though their sport is governed by no antitrust exemption, baseball fans should not expect repeal to lead to a field of dreams. by CNB