An "L.A. Times" column published recently opens this way:
Would minor league players be paid more if they could negotiate freely with every team?
Not necessarily, Major League Baseball warned Congress on Friday. Instead, players could lose job opportunities and communities could lose minor league teams, the league said in a 17-page letter to the committee exploring whether to strip baseball of its antitrust exemption.
Wow. What hypocrisy. What chutzpah.
Prior to the 2021 season, Rob Manfred, the non-baseball-loving commissioner of major league baseball, decided to rob 30 cities of their minor league baseball teams, including Batavia.
Arguably, baseball fans in Batavia are better off, thanks to Robbie Nichols and the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League. They brought to our small city a more engaging and community-connected brand of baseball, but there is one way that Batavia is indisputably worse off: lost revenue.
The former minor-league-affiliated Muckdogs was owned, in part, by the community and operated by a volunteer board of directors, the Genesee Community Baseball Club.
If that team was still part of the minor league system, it would have undoubtedly eventually been sold, and GCBC would have surely received a couple of million dollars as part of the deal; money that could have been reinvested in sports and recreation in the city of Batavia, benefiting our youth.
That money is lost, and there is nothing anybody can do about it. Why? MLB's anti-trust exemption, which was granted by the Supreme Court in 1922. Because the ruling was not based on Constitutional principles, it can be rescinded by an act of Congress.
That's just the sort of action Congress is considering -- finally -- and Manfred is fighting through deception and misinformation.
MLB's anti-trust exemption is good for nobody in America except the MLB -- certainly not the fans of baseball nor the players. It's time to subject the MLB to the same kind of competitive pressures that make things better in America.
