Sunday, March 20, 2005

What if baseball lost antitrust deal?
Teams like the Reds might move, but others would rush to replace them


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In calling Major League Baseball on the carpet Thursday over the steroids scandal, Congress employed both A) its public-persuasion power in holding nationally televised hearings, and B) its legal power in issuing subpoenas to force testimony from current and former players such as Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire.

But so far, lawmakers have only made vague allusions to C), its greatest power over baseball: the legislative ability to take away the antitrust exemption that MLB, unique among American businesses, has enjoyed for more than 80 years.

Without it, MLB would have little ability to control competition or restrict the movement of teams. That prospect has baseball owners - and players, whose salaries might suffer - quaking like a Little Leaguer facing a Randy Johnson fastball.

The threat isn't new. Lawmakers such as Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., a Hall of Fame pitcher, have invoked it often over the years to get owners and players to move on labor disputes, league contraction and economic issues.

It has been called Congress' "nuclear option" regarding MLB, because invoking it would blow away baseball's status quo and change the landscape of the game forever. Once Congress uses it, it's gone.

"It would mix things up quite a bit," said sports economist Bruce K. Johnson, the James Graham Brown Professor of Economics at Centre College in Danville, Ky.

Johnson is a noted expert on the antitrust exemption, along with such topics as the value of public goods generated by teams and stadiums. The way Johnson sees it, small-market teams such as the Reds, whose majority ownership already is up for grabs, could be gone to dreamier fields before you could say "Great American Ball Park" three times.

But Johnson favors canning the exemption for the long-term good of the game. A move by the Reds to, say, New Jersey would initially hurt Cincinnati, but "that would carve up the larger market, making it a much more even playing field for smaller markets."

"There probably would be more expansion and faster expansion. If teams like the Reds and the Royals move, that would leave behind some attractive pastures, made even more attractive by the fact that the big markets are now being divided up. And it would be easier for an upstart league to make a go of it."

As a result, player salaries would fall, Johnson added. "The Yankees wouldn't have as large a market, so star players wouldn't be worth as much to them if there were five teams in the New York area."

In short, Major League Baseball would better reflect market realities, and we wouldn't have nearly as much imbalance between "have" and "have-not" franchises.

Team movement hasn't hurt other pro sports leagues, which don't enjoy such an exemption to federal antitrust laws.

During the last 30 years, seven National Football League teams, seven National Basketball Association teams and nine National Hockey League teams have changed cities. But until this year's move by the former Montreal Expos to become the Washington Nationals, the last time MLB allowed a team to seek a different market was in 1971, when the Washington Senators became the Texas Rangers.

Baseball has no Baltimore Colts loading the moving vans to escape to Indianapolis in the middle of the night. It has no Al Davis staring down the National Football League to move the Raiders to Los Angeles.

A legal anomaly; disguised threats

"Without the antitrust exemption, there's no way Washington would have gone 30-plus years without a major league team," Johnson said. "And there's no way Baltimore could have extracted the kind of financial settlement they got from Major League Baseball to accept the Nationals."

That baseball enjoys the exemption at all is a legal anomaly. In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that baseball was not involved in interstate commerce, so it was exempt from antitrust laws. Later the court decided that maybe baseball was interstate commerce, but that antitrust laws weren't written for that kind of business. In 1972, the court said the exemption was wrong but upheld it anyway, leaving it up to Congress to fix it - which it hasn't done yet. Thus the thinly disguised threat behind Thursday's steroids hearing.

Steroids have nothing to do with the antitrust exemption per se, although many argue the exemption has institutionalized an arrogance in baseball that allowed the performance-enhancing drug problem to grow in the past decade. "Maybe Congress is at fault for sending the message that the antitrust exemption is also a public accountability exemption," Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., said Thursday.

And maybe this is Congress' chance to set it right by forcing MLB to clean house. After all, steroids do matter.

Their users gain an unfair strength advantage, tilting the playing field and tainting the records they set. The steroid-induced cloud may be the biggest challenge to integrity of the game and its records since the Black Sox gambling scandal in 1919. On the human level, steroids are known to cause numerous, devastating health problems for their users.

'A pyramid of steroid use'

But most of all, steroid use at the Major League level creates pressure on players at lower levels to shoot up in order to compete. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 500,000 students now in U.S. high schools have tried steroids - triple the number 10 years ago. Only 56 percent of teens believe steroids are harmful, compared with 71 percent in 1992.

"There is a pyramid of steroid use in our society, and the owners and players are at the top of that pyramid," Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said.

Fans aren't blameless. Their addiction to baseball's ultimate drug - the home run - has made it easy for Major League Baseball to let the steroid abuse continue. In opinion polls, fans now say overwhelmingly that if players are proven to have used steroids, their records should be stricken.

"But if Barry Bonds attracts record crowds this summer chasing the home run record, that's going to send a completely different signal," Johnson said. Of course, that depends on how well the San Francisco slugger comes back from Thursday's knee surgery, which could sideline Bonds until well after the season starts.

So it's up to Congress - which is why Thursday's hearing, while certainly an exercise in political grandstanding, was important.

Lawmakers ought to step up to the plate and win major concessions on drugs and economic issues from MLB, in exchange for legislation that modifies instead of eliminates the exemption.

In the 1998 Curt Flood Act, named after the player who unsuccessfully sued MLB over its reserve clause in 1970, Congress declared that antitrust laws apply to player movement and salaries. So there's a precedent for tweaking the exemption.

Otherwise, there's an exemption-killing court case just waiting to happen.

In 1993 Vince Piazza, father of catcher Mike Piazza and owner of about 30 auto dealerships, won a federal district court ruling in his bid to buy the San Francisco Giants and move the team to Tampa - but he then accepted what was reported as a $6 million settlement from MLB to drop the case. The next challenger might not settle.

Before that happens, Congress - and public pressure - should help baseball clean up its act. Let's get the national pastime back to the point where phrases like "the crack of the bat" and "speed on the basepaths" aren't drug-laced double entendres.

Ray Cooklis is assistant editorial page editor for the Enquirer; (513) 768-8525; rcooklis@enquirer.com.




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