SPONSORED BY NORTHEASTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY AND THE NEWBERRY LIBRARY

We are pleased to invite you to the  Chicago Seminar on Sport and Culture at the Newberry Library,  co-sponsored by Northeastern Illinois University and North Central College for a public lecture on May 8, 2009.   All sessions begin at 3:30 PM. The lectures are open to the public at no charge. The Newberry Library is located at 60 W. Walton, Chicago, IL.

Governing Baseball:
A History of the Relationship between Government and Major League Baseball

Christopher W. Schmidt

Visiting Scholar

American Bar Foundation

Visiting Associate Professor of Law

Chicago-Kent College of Law

ABSTRACT

Most historical accounts of the relationship between Major League Baseball (MLB) and the government emphasize baseball’s battle for independence from government regulation.  From the perspective of MLB, government oversight is a threat, with the withdrawal of the game’s treasured anti-trust exemption serving as the Sword of Damocles, threatening to fall whenever the organizers of the game refuse to submit to pressures from government officials seeking to reform the game.  In this account, club owners have struggled, generally successfully, to maintain their autonomy as a private enterprise by relentlessly resisting government intervention.

I argue that this resistance model of the MLB-government relationship tells only part of the story since often the relationship is  far from antagonistic.  Throughout the history of professional baseball, there have been opportunities for the game’s organizers to take advantage of the threat of government intervention to serve their own ends—namely, to consolidate control over their business, to maximize profits, and, at times, to create pressure for institutional reform.  I examine  two recurrent dynamics in the relationship that reflect the ways in which MLB has depended on and benefited from government oversight-- the game’s embrace of internal rules and procedures modeled on government norms—and baseball leaders’ strategical use of government as a tool for achieving desired goals.  The relationship between baseball and government  has always been simultaneously antagonistic and symbiotic.