Why Sotomayor Couldn't Really Save Baseball
Let me add my voice to all the many others -- the President's included! -- who have declared their eternal gratitude to Judge Sonia Sotomayor for doing what she could to save baseball from its self-destructive ways.
Sotomayor, as the world now knows, acted swiftly and decisively in 1995 when she issued the injunction that effectively ended the interminable strike that cost the game and its fans the 1994 World Series. Sotomayor essentially told the team owners that they could not take it upon themselves to turn back the hands of time and renege on their agreements with the players on salary arbitration, collusion rules and competitive free agent bidding.
Such is the state of a sport in which the bar is set so low that a court order against changing the rules of negotiation counts as a victory of historic proportions.
And for that dubious honor we can thank a jurist who otherwise served nobly on the very court Sotomayor has been nominated to join: Oliver Wendell Holmes.
For those who had somehow neglected to note it on their calendars, last Friday marked the 87th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision granting baseball's historic, blanket exemption from anti-trust laws. Holmes, who authored the decision, wrote that although players traveled across state lines to play baseball for money the game did not represent interstate commerce. That decision has left generations of legal scholars scratching their heads at its almost appalling absence of logic. In fact, the ruling is regarded as so nonsensical that in 1953, in a case involving pro football's more limited anti-trust exemption, Justice Tom Clark wrote that Holmes' opinion was "at best of dubious validity." He left it to Congress to take a second look.
It did.
And the exemption endures.
The baseball owners have successfully thwarted every attempt to dilute their monopolistic control over every professional team, game and player in the land, most famously in the late 1950s when the game's great innovator, Branch Rickey, tried to start a third major league, the Continental.
The failure of Rickey's daring plan underscored just how dearly baseball has paid for the absence of competition wrought by the anti-trust exemption. Where baseball entered in the 1960s as if life had not changed since the 1903 merger of the American and National leagues, the National Football League confronted and soon absorbed a rival circuit, Lamar Hunt's American Football League. It was the AFL that introduced the idea of competitive balance achieved through the equal sharing of television money. That idea, so fundamental to football's success, was Rickey's -- Hunt sat in on Continental League meetings -- and was to have been a founding tenet of his new league, had baseball had the foresight to accept it.
Instead baseball, having beaten back a competitor, allowed football to pass it by as the nation's most popular sport. Baseball may be more popular today than it has ever been, but that surge in interest came only after the owners wasted a generation unable to accept the simple and proven notion that what made good business sense for all teams made good sense of each of their clubs.
The owners, meanwhile, continued to insist that they were capable of policing their game themselves. Judge Sotomayor's ruling suggests that, in the view of one wise jurist, this is not the case.
Her ruling set in motion the restoration of play. The owners, understanding that they had once again been bested by their employees, voted not to lock the players out. The games went on. And that September, Cal Ripken, Jr. made everyone feel very good when he broke Lou Gehrig's consecutive game streak.
His feat did more than celebrate one man's endurance. It connected the sport to its golden era -- and what could be more fitting, given how relentlessly the game draws upon the past to ennoble the present.
It seems almost churlish to suggest that in 1995 Cal Ripken did not necessarily save baseball, and nor, for that matter, did Sonia Sotomayor. They helped the game, mightily. But salvation remains elusive. Perhaps it will come when another justice, on another court, writes why the time has come to do away with one particularly outdated vestige of baseball's, and the Supreme Court's past.
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I agree with you x76, baseball is dead. But thanks to steroids it will never decompose!
Baseball died anyway. No everyone realizes that yet. Baseball is as dead as a stick.
Baseball NEEDS to die a little. I would love to see it drop in popularity to where hockey is today. That way it will weed out all the fair weather fans who only want to see a home run every inning and whine everytime someone tries to clean up the game. Ownership needs to be taken down a peg or two as does the players union.
Baseball is dead? Where do you live? Baseball stadiums are selling tickets better than ever (current recession effect excluded).
Ole x here has never been to NY or Boston or LA or Chicago or ...
Affirative Action In ACTION
It is so like the conservatives to say it's OK when they nominate someone, but not when anyone else does. So she was good enough for Bush, but not for Obama???? hum I smell a RAT!!!! I worry about her religious views on certain issues however. These views need to be kept in the Church, not in the courts...Hopefully, she would be able to do just that.......along with the other justices...no matter what religious affiliation they are.
One of the best, most informative posts I have ever read here on the HuffPo. Thank you so much.
I don't think this article is directly addressing any racial bias the nominee has. It is simply saying that she sided with the interests of the employee rather than the out-of-touch, unbalanced decision-making of the owners. To be honest, baseball has been extremely lax to change it's image over the past fifty years, unlike football and basketball, scared that it would sever it's "purest" image from the minds of those who play it.
Baseball can be considered anything, but pure and bounced back only because management turned their eyes on steroid use. If 70 to 80% of players have been rumored to be using steroids, than it is equally reasonable to believe that 75% of Americans do not care about it and enjoy watching the homerun's sail out of the ballpark, all to the increased revenue's owners saw from 1995 until now. Sotomayor should be commended, at least, for her decision in telling the owner's that they had to abide by the compromises in their mutually arranged, collective bargaining agreement.
What I have never been able to comprehend is how rules mean nothing in baseball. The rules. They designate the strike zone as up near the letters, and yet no umpire will call anything above the belt. At the keystone corner during a double play attempt, the simple understanding is that the infielder must be in contact with both the baseball and the bag at one instant, and yet often that isn't the case, and the ump never minds.
And that one and two pitch to Dale Mithcell for a called third strike, ending the only Perfect Game in World Series history in 1956. The hitter said, "It was a foot outside." Stephen J Gould says that shouldn't matter, for some reason I wasn't able to learn from his article. It's just baseball logic, I suppose.
"Rules mean nothing" is unwarranted.
There is indeed a problem about the strike zone, and it's especially sad now that the technology for automatically calling strikes is available. Fixing this would, in my opinion, eliminate 99% of the problems with umpiring.
The example of "neighborhood plays" at second base is something else entirely. It is a reasonable way to lessen the danger of turning a doubleplay, when runners are allowed to "break up" the play by going after the secondbaseman. It's only allowed when there is no question of the runner beating the throw, so nobody is really getting away with anything.
The only other thing I would change about baseball rules, besides automating balls-and-strikes, would be to eliminate the ability of catchers to block the plate against runners coming home. I would consider blocking the plate to be catcher interference, just like for a batter leaving the box.
The catcher and pitcher OWNS the plate dude. Just as the fielders own the bags. Not blocking the plate? Why don't we just use nerf balls and everyone wear lots of padding all the time. Computer called balls and strikes!? Never talk baseball again. Okay? Stick to Candyland.
Baseball has become a pathetic sport, engaging itself in swirls of steroids and salaries that can run small countries. Once upon a time, I was as avid a fan of the sport as those who tattooed their teams mascot on their bodies (like my brother, with his Chief Wahoo forever etched on his calf). I lived for spring training, and died when my perennially awful Indians failed miserably at the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium.
Unlike many, I refused to return to the sport I played all the way through college, earning several all star trophies along the way. When baseball stops being mediocre and selfish, I might start watching again. Until then, I'll stick with football. At least they have salary caps. Oh, and I watch motorcycle racing, too.
I'll bet if The Tribe get into the playoffs you'll be back. It's tough to be a baseball fan if your team is not competitive. My Red Sox were consistently one of the worst in the game in the 60's Then the Impossible Dream Team went to the Series in '67 and lost in 7 to Gibson and the Cardinals. They have been competitive ever since. Last year they smashed Cleveland's consecutive sell out record and are still adding to it this season even in the recession. Mr. Shapiro makes a powerful point comparing baseball's structure to football's. MLB made some adjustments to help small market teams become more competitive (think Tamps Bay) but they did not go far enough. Unlike football big ball clubs like the Yankees and Red Sox own their own highly lucrative TV networks. It puts them at an unfair advantage over teams like Cleveland or Pittsburgh.
Uh, they were in the world series twice after the strike, and I didn't watch then. What makes you think I'd watch now? I meant what I said. The game has been tarnished nearly beyond repair. Tampa Bay, where I live now, appears to have been lucky.
I'm just not going to change my mind.
Republican Party is the party of Bullies.
Let's not forget that it was the homerun competition between Mark Maguire and Sammy Sosa in their race to pass Roger Maris that did more to bring fans back after the strike than anything else. Does that mean that Steroids helped save baseball?
The last sentence is not meant to belittle the contribution Judge Sotomayer made to baseball, but instead was only included so I could make the following point: If people don’t care what Pink Floyd were on when the recorded “Dark Side of the Moon”, then cut Barry Bonds some slack.
Well I wouldn't say steroids saved baseball, but their effects did play a role in it's re-emergence as the national past time, until their role was revealed which ended up striking a powerful blow to the sport.
As for the Pink Floyd analogy, I dig it, but the problem with that is most people listening to Dark Side of the Moon were on the same stuff the band was on. Lord knows the album, while still a classic, is not the same without some performance enhancers if you catch my drift.
The thing with baseball is in a lot of cases its a family event. And most parents I would imagine don't want to instill a a lesson of cheating to their kids. Cause that's what it boils down to is cheating by using a method not available to your opponent to win. Though in many cases these days the oppenent is just as likely to be on steroids as well.
Cal Ripken is God. He saved the game on his own and he continues to spread it around the world today.
Will Race Discrimination Ruling Burn Sonia Sotomayor? I hope, so before she has a chance to burn other Americans because she feels their the wrong RACE or SEX.
It so odd that liberals not so long ago fought to end RACISM against black Americans and yet today are promoting it as it OK to be a RACIST!
For HernandezUSA ....Give me something to substantiate your statement about why she is a racist,other than something that Limbaugh the windbag said of course, as I must be in the dark on this.......
Don't encourage him.
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