Celebrating “Let’s Push Jim’s Buttons Day”
Tony Adragna urges Congress to remove Major League Baseball’s anti-trust exemption.
Baseball is not a monopoly. Its competitors include the NFL, the NBA, college football, college basketball, hockey (look! straight face!), soccer (okay, let’s not get carried away), the X-Games, amusement parks, movie theaters, DVDs, concerts, whitewater rafting and just hanging out in the back yard. American consumers do not have a “baseball budget” that they simply must spend on America’s Former Pastime. Major League Baseball is a consortium of businessmen competing for the country’s entertainment dollars. Americans have an entertainment budget that could be spent on any number of things (or not spent), and that is what baseball is trying to get a piece of. Whether it’s “Where do I go?” or “What’s on the tube?” professional baseball, properly considered, faces massive competition. Ballpark or movie theater? The ballgame or Buffy? That baseball “consumers” have other choices available to meet their entertainment needs is clear from the game’s declining popularity.
Baseball also has to compete for its share of the talent pool - young athletes deciding, as they move through high school, which sport to concentrate on. Theoretically they are even competing with other sports in the corporate welfare sweepstakes for stupid stadium deals from stupid local governments, although that competition is mitigated by the fact that governments can always just make you give them more money to shovel into the pockets of sports owners. (And well-connected local construction magnates…)
One reason the owners and players settled for the first time without a work stoppage or an outside arbitrator is that they strongly suspected the sport could not bounce back from a work stoppage - in other words, that Major League Baseball could die or suffer lasting injury.
If baseball is a monopoly, its “monopoly power” isn’t doing it much good.
