Lawsuit called on account of settlement

For the past eight years, minor league baseball players have been in litigation with Major League Baseball, seeking to void a rule capping their pay and prohibiting payment outside the baseball season. On the eve of trial, a settlement emerged.

Our national pastime

America’s antitrust laws have a clear public purpose: to prevent a few actors from cornering a market and making private deals to eliminate competition and control prices. From oil producers to search engines to pharmaceuticals to phone carriers to concert promoters, the big players strive for that control, and at their best, America’s antitrust laws try to stop them.

Except for professional sports, where the winning argument has been that competitive league play requires club owners to collaborate over the rules: those roles include collaboration over who gets which players, for how long, at what price, and under a series of complicated rules that change from sport to sport. Through player drafts, trades, and free agency, this is perhaps the last bastion of legally buying and selling people in our nation, albeit in gilded cages, with multimillion-dollar salaries.