DePaul Journal of Sports Law Volume 4 Issue 2 Spring 2008 Article 2 Anatomy of an Aberration: An Examination of the Attempts to Apply Antitrust Law to Major League Baseball through Flood v. Kuhn (1972) David L. Snyder Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/jslcp Recommended Citation David L. Snyder, Anatomy of an Aberration: An Examination of the Attempts to Apply Antitrust Law to Major League Baseball through Flood v. Kuhn (1972), 4 DePaul J. Sports L. & Contemp. Probs. 177 (2008) Available at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/jslcp/vol4/iss2/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Law at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in DePaul Journal of Sports Law by an authorized editor of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ANATOMY OF AN ABERRATION: AN EXAMINATION OF THE ATTEMPTS TO APPLY ANTIRUST LAW TO MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL THROUGH FLOOD V. KUHN (1972) David L. Snyder* I. INTRODUCTION The notion that baseball has always been exempt from antitrust laws is a commonly accepted postulate in sports law. This historical overview traces the attempts to apply antitrust law to professional baseball from the development of antitrust law and the reserve system in baseball in the late 1800s, through the lineage of cases in the Twen- tieth Century, ending with Flood v. Kuhn in 1972.1 A thorough exam- ination of the case history suggests that baseball's so-called antitrust "exemption" actually arose from a complete misreading of the Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore, Inc.