Information Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Information - Essay Example One reason, the focus of my speech today, is the special protection that baseball (Major League Baseball) has been afforded by Congress. This protection comes in the form of antitrust law and, to a significant extant, insulates owners and other interested stakeholders from competition within the baseball industry. As an initial matter, it is important to define what is meant by antitrust law, a topic frequently foreign to baseball aficionados. Antitrust law is an umbrella designation that includes a number of laws dealing with fair competition; more specifically, because America deems itself a free market capitalist economy, there exist a number of laws designed to prevent such things as monopolies and unfair methods of competition. Strangely enough, baseball has for quite some time been exempt from a number of antitrust laws. As stated by Bartee, â€Å"professional sports are a textbook example of a bilateral cartel made up of club owners and unionized players engaged in intrastate and interstate commerce. The club owners exercise monopoly power in the product market† (2008: n.p.). Baseball, like steel or agriculture in certain respects, is a protected industry. It is not a monopoly per se but a competitive cartel in which owners compete with the unionized players. We read all of the time about competition between owners and players. There are disagreements about such things as free agency, salary caps, and collective bargaining agreements. The irony is that while the owners and the players often trade accusations about the other using unfair methods or misleading financial formulas the truth is that both reap the rewards of a non-competitive industry because of the antitrust exemption granted to Major League Baseball by the United States Congress. In addition, in a 1972 case called Kuhn v. Flood and decided by the United States Supreme Court, it was also decided that â€Å"baseball and its reserve system are also exempt from state antitrust