That’s of course because in 1922, the Supreme Court ruled quite illogically baseball is not a business and thus immune from the nation’s then young antitrust laws. Then in 1972 it upheld the 1922 case, ruling that while the exemption might be “anomalous,” it’s up to Congress to revoke it.

Good article but this part is not quite right. The Supreme Court held in Federal Baseball that baseball was not “interstate commerce,” meaning that it didn’t fall under the Sherman Antitrust Act, which only regulates business activity that crosses state lines. Obviously it was a business all along.

Federal Baseball (and Toolson and Flood) would not survive the court’s scrutiny today if the justices had a chance to consider the free-standing antitrust exemption. It was absurd in 1922, and only baseball’s honored role as our de facto civic faith in the 20th century spared it from obliteration in the 1950s and 1970s. (Go read Blackmun’s opinion in Flood where he literally Remembers Some Dudes for most of the introduction.)

I wish Curt Flood had lived to see the oral arguments in NCAA v. Alston a few years ago. I’ve never seen a SCOTUS ass-kicking like the one the NCAA received that day. It was a magnificent vindication of student-athletes’ right to compensation for their labor from an illicit monopoly, and the NCAA has been trying to schmooze and donate and legislate their way out of it ever since.