Baseball on Trial: The Origin of Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption by Nathaniel Grow (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Baseball on Trial: The Origin of Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption by Nathaniel Grow Jim Overmyer Nathaniel Grow. Baseball on Trial: The Origin of Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 282 pp. Paper, $35.00. The Federal League survived for only two years as a challenge to the existing major leagues in 1914 and 1915. Its long-lasting material importance is limited to Chicago’s Wrigley Field, built for that city’s entrant in the league and later transferred to the National League’s Cubs. But the league’s messy demise gave professional baseball an advantage available to no other American sport—exemption from federal antitrust laws, bestowed by the US Supreme Court in 1922. This has allowed organized baseball to run itself via rules—particularly the reserve clause, limiting the movement of players between teams—that seem to be antithetical to American standards of business competition and labor freedom. But those rules also provide the top-down discipline that allows for the professional stability that makes leagues and teams credible. Nathaniel Grow, a professor of legal studies at the University of Georgia, surveys the entirety of this crucial legal dispute with a keen sense of organization and writing clarity. He is more than willing to second-guess the choices made by the baseball executives and their attorneys, and he debunks the commonly held criticism of two of the judges in the case, US District Judge (and future baseball commissioner) Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., widely seen by later commentators as pushovers for organized baseball’s attorneys. Grow’s deep view of the case is also aided by good old research elbow grease; he has read the court decisions, contemporaneous press accounts, and newly available correspondence among case attorneys. The Federal League needed big-league-quality players to sell itself as a major league; so before the 1914 season, the new league tried to recruit National and American Leaguers. Some players signed, many refused to sign, and some defected to the Feds but then had a change of heart and went back to their original clubs. The raids set off a flurry of lawsuits on both the state and federal court level, which Grow recounts in detail. But these scattershot legal [End Page 138] challenges produced conflicting legal opinions enforceable only in the courts’ geographically limited jurisdictions. The decision in one case involving a player’s possible right to jump his contract to play in the Federal League was sufficiently split so that “both sides declared victory” (36). This overall legal confusion added to growing Federal problems at the box office. Meanwhile, organized baseball was being cautioned by its lawyers about the narrow line the majors walked between maintaining a tight organization and possibly committing antitrust violations and the need to avoid a showdown over the Sherman Antitrust Act. Peace feelers were extended but failed. Having made no real progress litigating on a player-by-player basis, the Federal League decided to attack its opponents’ very foundations. In the US District Court in Chicago, the Feds claimed the majors were engaged in an illegal monopoly designed to destroy their new league. “We’re going to break up organized baseball” is how Federal League president James Gilmore put it (65). The case landed before Judge Landis. After an extensive hearing on the Feds’ request for an injunction against the majors, both sides awaited his ruling—which didn’t come. The judge still had it under advisement when the 1915 season ended and still had not ruled when the league finally fell apart. Landis, of course, became commissioner of baseball in 1921 and has long been suspected of failing to rule until the Federal League folded, thereby currying favor with his future employers. Grow thinks this criticism is “not entirely fair” (111). In fact, the judge’s carefully worded explanation on why he had not ruled was equivocal as to which side he might have come down on and didn’t gladden the hearts of major-league executives at all. The major leagues still wanted to put all legal issues to rest. A final “peace” agreement in December 1915 provided cash...