MLB has one real use for antitrust exemption. Here's what it is
To baseball fans across America, the time-honored cry of summer is this: Kill the ump! The understanding, at the time that was passed, was that we were going to preserve the franchise relocation benefits that existed in the exemption.” The Senate Judiciary Committee asked for information from Advocates for Minor Leaguers, an organization that considers the exemption as the reason why major league teams can control minor leaguers for as long as seven years and agree on a minor league pay scale. “The other thing to bear in mind is that minor league baseball exists as the result of hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies from Major League Baseball.” How would Manfred explain to the common fan why the salary for a triple-A player starts at about $14,000 a year, when the salary for a player at the highest level of hockey’s minor leagues starts at $52,000? “First of all, it’s a much larger minor league system than it is in hockey,” Manfred said. However, if Manfred believes franchise relocation is the only “really meaningful” application of the antitrust exemption, it would be no surprise if Congress asks MLB to agree to limit the exemption to franchise relocation.
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