Book Review: Baseball Economics and Public Policy

• Date: 01 September 1983
• DOI: 10.1177/0003603X8302800307
• Published date: 01 September 1983
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

The Antitrust Bulletin/Fall 1983 783

Baseball Economics and Public Policy

Jesse

W.

Markham and Paul

V.

Teplitz

Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath &Company (1981), XIV +179

pp.,

$21.95.

Reviewed by John J. Siegfried, Chairman, Department

of

Economics and Business Administration, Vanderbilt University,

Nashville,

Tenn.

In Ernest Lawrence Thayer's classic poem of

1888

mighty Casey

strikes out. In the summer of

1981

the Major League Players'

Association went out on strike. This book on baseball also strikes

out-at

the proposals to eliminate baseball's special antitrust

exemption, and as a balanced evaluation of the effects that

eliminating the exemption would have on competition in the

baseball industry.

It

is not surprising that the book should sound like a brief for

the baseball owners, for that, indeed, is what it is. The authors

readily confess in the foreword that they prepared the document

for prospective congressional hearings on repealing baseball's

antitrust exemption. Thus my criticisms should be viewed more as

the type of points which might have been tendered by the

opposition at such hearings than as criticisms of an impartial

evaluation of baseball economics. Our differences of opinion

reflect different judgments about the goals of the antitrust laws

or about empirical magnitudes (e.g., elasticities) on which there is

ample room to quarrel. We also apparently disagree on the

appropriate criteria by which to evaluate the effects that remov-

ing the antitrust exemption would have on competition.

Nevertheless, I shall take advantage of the weak debating

position

of

authors who do not even know their book is being

reviewed in order to tell you why the book's premise, that

baseball should retain its special treatment under the antitrust

©1984by federal Legal Publications, Inc.