[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 9 (Tuesday, January 17, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H245-H246]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

  Mr. BUNNING. Mr. Speaker, last week, the owners of major league 
baseball visited Capitol Hill to urge Members of Congress to leave 
their exemption from the antitrust laws alone.
  Many of you may also have seen a letter which went out last week from 
Acting Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, which outlined a 
number of reasons that he felt vindicated the existence of the 
antitrust exemption.
  I thought it was time that you heard the other side of the story.
  Mr. Selig, in his letter, insisted that major league baseball does 
not operate as an economic cartel.
  That is wrong. Major league baseball operates as a cartel in classic 
monopoly fashion. The owners, not market forces, dictate how the supply 
of its product will be allocated. The antitrust exemption shields major 
league baseball from market forces and makes competition impossible. 
That sounds like a monopoly to me.
  Mr. Selig also insists that repeal of the antitrust exemption would 
not end the baseball strike. Wrong again. All signs point the other 
way. Don Fehr, the head of the Major League Baseball Players 
Association, has publicly stated many times that if the exemption were 
repealed, he would strongly urge the players to end the strike.
  Mr. Selig insisted that the players should agree to a salary cap 
because it is good and because it has worked for football and 
basketball.
  Wrong yet again. Football and basketball do have salary caps, but 
those caps were negotiated through the collective bargaining process. 
The baseball owners want to impose the cap unilaterally.
  Baseball has a problem because the owners have been unable to reach 
agreement on how to share revenues between small market teams and large 
market teams.
  But, instead of hammering out an agreement, they are now trying to 
arbtrarily impose a salary cap on the players to force the players to 
solve the owners' problem for them.
  Mr. Selig said that the antitrust exemption has not hurt the players. 
That is as wrong as wrong can be. I know it is hard to feel sorry for 
baseball players with median salaries of half a million dollars. And it 
is also true that the baseball players union has been very effective in 
the past several decades and has been able to win--through collective 
bargaining--some of the rights that other American workers have been 
guaranteed by law.
  But the antitrust exemption does hurt players. It is a constant 
threat hanging over their heads. The owners know--that because of the 
exemption--that if they are able to break the union, the players have 
no place to turn.
  Mr. Selig, in his letter, insisted that repealing the exemption would 
hurt baseball, fans, and communities that have franchises.
  He is wrong again. The other major professional sports do not have an 
antitrust exemption but franchise movement has been slight.
  After eight work stoppages in the last 24 years, and the current 
strike that has destroyed one season and threatens another, it is hard 
to imagine anyone suggesting that the antitrust exemption is good for 
the fans.
  And then Mr. Selig dredged up the old trusty line that repealing and 
antitrust exemption would destroy the minor leagues.
  This is a very effective line because minor league teams are 
scattered around the country and touch the lives and economies of small 
towns throughout the Nation.
  But the plain truth of the matter is major league baseball has to 
have the minor leagues. It traditionally takes longer to develop 
professional baseball players than football or basketball players.
  If the minor leagues were done away with, the decline in quality 
would be devastating to the integrity of the game and destroy baseball. 
The owners are smart enough not to jeopardize their investments in 
their teams by letting that happen.
   [[Page H246]] The minor leagues are indispensable to the future of 
major league baseball. Repeal of the exemption does not threaten them 
in any way. That's a smoke screen.
  Through it all, I can understand where Mr. Selig is coming from.
  Major league baseball has to have this exemption removed for the good 
of the fans, the game, and anybody else that wants a season in 1995.


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