MLB | The Two Pages That Made Baseball a Legal Monopoly (Federal Baseball, US Capitol)

On 29 May 1922 the Supreme Court of the United States decided, unanimously, that professional baseball was not interstate commerce. The opinion ran to a couple of pages. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr wrote that the business was giving exhibitions of baseball, and that these were purely state affairs. Players crossing state lines to reach them was incidental, the way a lawyer travelling to argue a case does not thereby make the argument a matter of interstate trade.

The plaintiff was the Baltimore club of the Federal League, the third major league that had challenged the National and American leagues from 1914 and collapsed after 1915. The other Federal League owners had been bought off in a settlement. Baltimore refused, sued under the Sherman Act, won triple damages at trial, lost on appeal, and took it to the Supreme Court, where it lost 9-0.

Here is the part usually got wrong. Federal Baseball did not create an exemption. It held that baseball was not commerce at all, so there was nothing to be exempt from. The exemption proper arrived in 1953 in Toolson, when the Court, faced with a commerce doctrine that had expanded enormously in the intervening thirty years, declined to overturn the earlier result and handed the question to Congress instead.

In 1972 Curt Flood, who had refused a trade and given up his career over it, forced the issue again. The Court conceded in Flood v. Kuhn that baseball is interstate commerce, called the exemption an aberration, and kept it anyway on the ground that Congress had had fifty years to legislate and had not. Congress finally acted in part in 1998, removing the exemption for major-league players' labour relations and leaving everything else.

Everything else is a great deal: territorial exclusivity, broadcasting, the structure of the minor leagues. When Major League Baseball cut 42 affiliated minor-league clubs in 2020, the resulting antitrust suit failed, and the Supreme Court declined to revisit the doctrine. Baseball remains the only American professional sport with this protection.

The Court had no building of its own in 1922. It sat inside the Capitol, in the chamber the Senate had vacated in 1859, and did so until its own building opened in 1935. The room is restored and open to visitors on the Capitol tour.

Coordinates are the United States Capitol, from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: the Supreme Court's chamber in the Capitol as pictured in 1921, the year before this case was argued there. Keystone View Company, from Collier's New Encyclopedia, 1921. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the restored Old Senate Chamber, photographed for the Office of the Architect of the Capitol, 2012. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.