A History Lesson

The 2013 Major League Baseball season will begin on April 1, 2013 which is exactly 141 days from today and it will be 100 days on December 22, 2012. Major League Baseball has been making history over the last two decades with the advent of the wild card and then the expansion of the wild card system. We have had the first tie in the All-Star Game which has now forced us to create a rule that gives the winning side home field advantage in the World Series. Major League Baseball has seen its home run record fall a few times and not thanks to what many are saying was the steroid era, this is still up for debate. We have also introduced four new teams with all of them going to the World Series and two of them winning the whole thing, Cubs and Indians fans sure are not happy about that. Major League Baseball will make one more piece of history coming up in the 2013 season and that is due to realignment when the Houston Astros move to the American League giving both sides 15 teams which means we will have interleague play all season long.

If you watch Major League Baseball you are sure to see something that has never happened before and so for the next 141 days I am going to highlight a day in Major League Baseball history.

November 9, 1953- Reaffirming its earlier position, the United States Supreme Court rules, 7-2, baseball is a sport and not a business. This decision exempts baseball from anti-trusts laws (http://www.nationalpastime.com/).

Imagine is baseball were found as a business and had to follow anti-trust laws, our game certainly would not be the same today. At the time in 1953 I could understand that this would happen because baseball was America's past time whereas the NFL and NBA were still in their start up phases trying to figure out what direction they were going. Major League Baseball had been around for well over 50 years by this point and knew were they were going. In today's market though you could not accuse Major League Baseball of trying to monopolize the market because they have been overtaken by the NFL and NBA, in which questions have been raised about the NFL but have been found to be the same as the MLB in 1953.