There is no crying in antitrust: The Tipline for 29 May 2019

There is “no crying in baseball” – or antitrust enforcement. On this date in 1922, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s ruling that baseball is not trade or interstate commerce and thus is not subject to the Sherman Act. That decision, penned by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, hollowed out an apparent antitrust exemption for America’s pastime. The court revisited the question 50 years later, and although it acknowledged that baseball games qualified as interstate commerce, Justice Harry Blackmun held that the exemption was “an aberration confined to baseball”.