Then there are the many names, celebrated for one reason or another, that have sparked the diamond and its environs and that have provided tinder for recaptured thrills, for reminiscence and comparisons, and for conversation and anticipation in-season and off-season: Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Henry Chadwick, Eddie Collins, Lou Gehrig, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Hooper, Goose Goslin, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner, Joe McCarthy, John McGraw, Deacon Phillippe, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Tommy Leach, Big Ed Delahanty, Davy Jones, Germany Schaefer, King Kelly, Big Dan Brouthers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Wee Willie Keeler, Big Ed Walsh, Jimmy Austin, Fred Snodgrass, Satchel Paige, Hugh Jennings, Fred Merkle, Iron Man McGinnity, Three-Finger Brown, Harry and Stan Coveleski, Connie Mack, Al Bridwell, Red Ruffing, Amos Rusie, Cy Young, Smokey Joe Wood, Chief Meyers, Chief Bender, Bill Klem, Hans Lobert, Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker, Roy Campanela, Miller Huggins, Rube Bressler, Dazzy Vance, Edd Roush, Bill Wambsganess, Clark Griffith, Branch Rickey, Frank Chance, Cap Anson, Nap Lajoie, Sad Sam Jones, Bob O’Farrell, Lefty O’Doul, Bobby Veach, Willie Kamm, Heinie Groh, Lloyd and Paul Waner, Stuffy McInnis, Charles Comiske, Roger Bresnahan, Bill Dickey, Zack Wheat, George Sisler, Charlie Gehringer, Eppa Rixey, Harry Heilmann, Fred Clarke, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Pie Traynor, Rube Waddell, Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Old Hoss Radbourne, Moe Berg, Rabbit Maranville, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove. The list seems endless.
Indeed it does. According to The Brethren, a 1979 book by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong, some of the other justices and their clerks insisted on adding their own favorite players to the list after the first draft was circulated, which helps explain the length. The book’s original claim that Blackmun’s first draft did not include any Black baseball players until Justice Thurgood Marshall pressured him to add three—Campanella, Robinson, and Paige—has been debunked by Blackmun’s archival papers. All of this is great fodder for baseball fans, of course, but it is hardly the work of the highest court in the land.
Baseball’s antitrust exemption has nonetheless changed since the Flood ruling. The reserve clause was sharply curtailed during union negotiations in the years following the court’s decision, eventually leading to professional baseball’s modern free-agency system. Flood’s failed war against the clause was later memorialized when Congress passed the Curt Flood Act of 1998, which lowered baseball’s antitrust shield when it came to labor negotiations. But the exemption itself remains a broad and potent tool in MLB’s legal arsenal, according to the ValleyCats and the Sea Unicorns.
“Major League Baseball—the largest professional baseball association—and its independently-owned teams may thus engage in anticompetitive conduct, to the detriment of consumers and the public,” the teams told the court in their petition for review. “They openly carry on their businesses in ways that ‘would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America.’ They are free to conspire to raise prices, inflate their earnings with monopoly rents, or (as they did here) enter into a horizontal agreement to reduce output and boycott other businesses.”