Thread by @craigcalcaterra

When GOPers get riled re: most things it *seems* like they're full of shit but requires some research to see exactly why. Them being full of shit about baseball, a thing I know about more than them, is a clarifying reminder of how blatantly full of shit they are from the get-go.

Their assumptions about the economic impact of things like the All-Star Game, their beliefs about MLB's racial/political orientation, both historical and current, the antitrust exemption -- they just comically have no idea what the hell they're talking about.

If you're lucky enough to see this in your own bailiwick the bad faith on their part is as plain as day. And a good reminder to never their take their bad faith on on its own terms elsewhere. It's not worthy of engagement most of the time. It's like bargaining with a child.

No, it's "if you don't understand what the fuck you're talking about, you're not worth engagement."

Hope that's clarifying for you.

https://twitter.com/tylerschmidt31/status/1378317852764205058?s=20

A great part of the antitrust exemption is that MLB would probably never have it if it wasn't racist as hell.

The suit which led to the Supreme Court case giving MLB the antitrust exemption was filed in 1915. Over the next year or two, rather than litigate, MLB started buying out the plaintiffs, giving Federal League owners a chance to buy MLB teams, paying off others to make it go away.

Charles Weeghman of the Whales was allowed to purchase the Chicago Cubs and move them into what is now Wrigley Field. The owner of the St. Louis Terriers was allowed to buy the Browns. All the other owners, save one, agreed to buyouts. Players were sent to MLB clubs.

Because of that, the Federal League was over and the lawsuit in front of Kennesaw Mountain Landis, then just a judge, was dropped.

One holdout ownership group, however — that of the Baltimore Terrapins — held firm. Not necessarily out of principle re: antitrust laws. They wanted to be admitted to the National or American League as a big league club.

The Major League owners didn’t think Baltimore was a suitable market, though, partially because they thought the city was too small. But, oh yeah, because they thought Baltimore had too large of a Black population.

With no deal, the Terrapin owners revived the suit, eventually leading to Holmes' 1922 decision giving baseball an antitrust exemption.

Racism paid off for MLB owners!

Oh, and Kennesaw Landis' slow-rolling of the original lawsuit, which allowed MLB owners to wait out and buy out the Federal League guys, certainly helped them. It was a big reason why, when they needed a commissioner a few years later, they hired him.

I'll mostly leave the parsing of Georgia's voter suppression efforts to others. There is no shortage of good information on that. But fewer people are hipped to what the actual economic impact is of MLB games/events, and there's a LOT of bad information out there on that.

Short version: claims from either side that MLB moving the All-Star Game is a HUGE ECONOMIC BLOW . . . are wrong. Yes, it's a super high-profile thing. It has big symbolic value. It matters to isolated businesses/people/interests, but it is not a big deal in a macro sense.

People on both sides have some political reasons to claim this is a major economic decision by MLB, but that's either bad faith or a lazy assumption based on years and years of people accepting claims about sports' economic impact uncritically.

MLB, its teams and its owners play that up to get stadiums built for it and to make claims about their own importance, but it's wildly overstated and sometimes outright fabricated. Like when the Academy says "two billion people watch the Oscars!"

Haha, no they don't.

A fun thing to do is to look at the entire gross revenue of Major League Baseball and compare it to other businesses. It's pretty small! $10 billion. As a company it wouldn't make the top 300 in the U.S. in revenue. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l…

More to the point, virtually all of the studies of any worth show that the local economic impact of professional sports is really low. Far lower than almost anyone assumes. Ask economists like @jc_bradbury about that.

Which is to say that the significance here is not economic. It's about public stances and principles and listening to players, fans, sponsors and other interests around the game. It's very much to the merits of voting rights, not, as we so often say, about the money as such.

Final thing on this thread: history of the Antitrust Exemption. A thing that, oh my, I sure hope those bad, bad Republicans do not take away from my beloved baseball! I would be so upset if MLB were thrown into that briar patch! I would feel so owned! mlb.nbcsports.com/2019/05/29/hap…