For Curt Flood, Antitrust Meant Exactly That at Supreme Court

If Curt Flood were an athlete in any sport other than baseball, he would have certainly won his 1972 Supreme Court antitrust case. Flood wanted the Court to rule that the "reserve clause" that baseball teams used to tie a player to the team that first signed him, and allowed the team to trade the player with no ability to contest it was in violation of federal antitrust laws that prevented such rules.

Flood lost his case because the Supreme Court decided an old stupid case that they knew was old and stupid was controlling precedent and shouldn't be overturned. Antitrust law applies to every single sport other than MLB, with the exception of limited antitrust exemptions granted by Congress. Flood v. Kuhn is considered a ridiculous case in many ways.

The first part of the Flood v. Kuhn opinion is a gushing, flowery homage to baseball, done in an attempt to demonstrate baseball's special place in American society. Supreme Court decisions, or any sort of sane and sober judicial opinion, doesn't typically read like a press release for one side of the case.

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Flood wasn't the first one to challenge baseball on antitrust grounds. The first baseball antitrust opinion was Federal Baseball Club v. National League. In that ruling, the famous jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the opinion that baseball is purely a state affair and that the travel to other states was merely incidental to the sport and not a part of interstate commerce. If that view were correct, then federal antitrust law wouldn't apply.

Many years later, the Court decided that both football and basketball were covered by antitrust law. In one of those cases in the late 50's, the Court admitted "were we considering the question of baseball for the first time upon a clean slate, we would have no doubts" that it was interstate commerce.

Given the rulings against other sports, and statements such as that, it was reasonable to believe that Flood might be able to get the old case overturned for not making a lick of sense compared to the other sports. The majority opinion in the Flood case actually called the baseball line of antitrust cases an "aberration." However, the Court decided that because that line of cases had been relied on for so long, and that Congress hadn't changed the laws after the case, that baseball alone would have protection from antitrust law applying to it.

Legal scholars now look back at this case as an illustration of jurists being overly romantic in their description of things and for the proposition that some old case law is so out of line with other opinions that it should not be mindlessly followed. For sports fans, the case stands for the view that MLB is a unique and special American past time that is treated more special by our government than any other sport, or perhaps that the Supreme Court does some odd things.

Stephanie Stradley is a Texas attorney, contributor to FanHouse, and writes a blog for the Houston Chronicle online.