Playing the Field: Why Sports Teams Move and Cities Fight to Keep Them.

• Author: Siegfried, John J.

Playing the Field is about the imbalance of power in negotiations between professional sports teams and their urban hosts. That professional sports teams have cities over a barrel in negotiations is beyond question. The largesse that teams have extracted in concessions from cities since the Dodgers and Giants bolted New York for California is staggering. Many professional sports teams have persuaded cities to build stadiums for their use and then have secured lease arrangements that would make the holder of a well-maintained rent-controlled New York penthouse blush. This power to extract rents is rooted in the geographic mobility of professional sports teams.

Euchner's diagnosis of the underlying cause for this metropolitan impotence in bargaining with professional sports teams is the insulation of professional sports league admission and team transfer rules from the Sherman Antitrust Act. Baseball acquired its protection in the 1922 Supreme Court Federal Baseball Club v. National League decision written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in which the Court decided that baseball at the time was not interstate commerce. Baseball has eluded the wider definition of interstate commerce that has evolved since then, although it currently is under Congressional assault, specifically by Florida Senator Connie Mack. In 1962 professional football obtained a statutory exemption for its collective sales of broadcasting rights, and insulated its practice of restricting entry into the league from antitrust scrutiny by including a provision allowing such limitations in its agreement with the National Football League Players Association. Provisions of collective bargaining agreements negotiated at arms length are exempt from the Sherman Act.

The specific practice which brings cities to their knees when bargaining with professional sports teams is the barrier to entry of new teams into the premier league in each sport. This contrived scarcity drives up the value of having a team. Some cities have professional sports teams and others do not, making the acquisition of a franchise a "positional good." Cities that host professional sports teams believe they are recognized as "big league," relish the vivid symbolism of growth and vitality represented by a professional sports franchise, and enjoy the chance to promote a common interest in an urban environment where conflict is more common than cooperation in the perpetual battle for scarce resources. Because there...