After months of threats and saber-rattling, the City of San Jose sued Major League Baseball and its 30 constituent teams on Tuesday over MLB’s refusal to allow the Oakland A’s to move to San Jose.

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in San Jose, is a direct challenge to MLB’s federal antitrust exemption. San Jose claims that MLB places unreasonable restrictions on competition by giving each team its own exclusive territory (or in the case of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, shared territory) and veto power to prevent any other team from moving into that territory. As I explained in this FanGraphs post last September, under MLB rules, a team can move into the territory of another team only when the following conditions are met: a vote of three-fourths of the owners approving the move; the two ballparks are located at least five miles apart; the move results in no more than two teams in a single territory; and the team moving compensates the team already in the territory.

In addition to the federal antitrust claims, San Jose also charged MLB with violations of California antitrust law and with state law claims for interference with prospective economic advantage based on San Jose’s agreement to allow the A’s to buy certain parcels of city land, if the A’s plan to move is approved by the league.

You can read the lawsuit in its entirety here.

San Jose is represented by Joe Cotchett and his law firm, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy. Cotchett is a nationally well-known and well-regarded attorney with experience in antitrust cases. In fact, Cotchett represented the National Football League and the (former) Los Angeles Rams when the Oakland Raiders sued the league for antitrust violations in 1982 when the league voted against allowing the Raiders to move to Los Angeles. The Raiders won that lawsuit, and paved the way for other professional sports franchises to move from city to city more easily.

Except, that is, in baseball.

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Highly-touted prospect Gerrit Cole made his major-league debut for the Pirates on Tuesday night.  The 22-year-old right handed pitcher was the first overall pick in the 2011 amateur draft. Heading into this season, Baseball America ranked Cole as No. 7 on the list of top 100 prospects. Even with the Pirates in contention in the National League Central — or perhaps because of it — Cole’s arrival in Pittsburgh was much anticipated.

Less than 30 minutes before first pitch, Pittsburgh sports columnist Dejan Kovacevic sent this tweet:
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Major League Baseball has stepped up its investigation of Biogenesis, the now-defunct anti-aging clinic that reportedly provided performing enhancing drugs to many MLB players. According to an ESPN news report last week, MLB has secured the cooperation of former Biogenesis director Anthony Bosch and plans to rely on Bosch’s testimony and documents as a basis for suspending more than a dozen players for violations of the league’s Joint Drug Policy.

There’s been a great deal of hue and cry over MLB’s deal with Bosch and with good reason. Our colleague Jonah Keri, writing at Grantland the day after ESPN’s report, raised important questions about Bosch’s credibility and the scope of MLB’s proposed action. [Disclosure: I was on vacation last week, but assisted Jonah on his post, as he noted.] Others have defended MLB’s plan to rid the sport of PEDs “once and for all.” As with most discussions about PEDs and baseball, there’s a lot of disagreement, accented by rage (faux or not) and hyperbole.

If you’re familiar with my writing, you know I’m not one to shy away from a healthy argument. But arguments are strongest when backed by verifiable facts. Such was the lesson of my legal training and experience. So before we get too far down the road in deriding or defending MLB’s conduct, let’s take some time to parse through the facts.

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Major League Baseball’s amateur draft starts on Thursday. MLB Network and MLB.com will broadcast and stream, respectively, pick-by-pick coverage of the first four rounds: Round One, Competitive Balance Round A, Round Two, and Competitive Balance Round B. In essence, the top 73 spots. The draft will continue untelevised on Friday and Saturday.

We’re getting you ready for the draft with two posts. Last Thursday, in Part 1, I explained the changes to draft selection order brought about by the collective bargaining agreement executed in late 2011. Certain changes didn’t take full effect until this year, so even if you followed last year’s draft, give Part 1 a read as a refresher.

Today, in Part 2, I’ll explain the limits placed on how much each team can spend to sign each draft pick and on all their draft picks combined. The first restriction is known as the draft slot value. The second is known as the draft bonus pools.

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Major League Baseball will kick off its amateur draft on Thursday, June 6. MLB Network and MLB.com will cover the draft live starting at 7:00 p.m. EDT. The pick-by-pick coverage will include the First Round, Competitive Balance Round A, Second Round, and Competitive Balance Round B — 73 picks in total.  The remainder of the draft will take place on June 7 and 8.

We will get you ready for the amateur draft — also known as the Rule-4 draft — with two posts. Today in Part 1, we’ll provide a refresher on the new rules put in place in the most recent MLB-MLBPA collective bargaining agreement. We’ll then show how those rules were applied in coming up with this year’s draft selection order.

In Part 2, we’ll explain the bonus slots for each selection, the total bonus pools for each team, and look back at bit at how spending has changed in the last five years.

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Yankees Global Enterprises, the parent company of the New York Yankees, has teamed with the Manchester City Football Club of the English Premier League to bring a new Major League Soccer team to New York. The team will be known as the New York Football Club and will begin action in 2015 MLS season. The New York Times reported that the Yankees have invested as much as $25 million toward the $100 million purchase price.

Manchester City is owned by an investment group led by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi. That group has been working with MLS for several years to launch a new New York franchise. The New York Red Bulls play in Harrison, New Jersey.

The Yankees’ involvement in the Manchester City bid came together quickly in the past several weeks. The two sides know each other well as the Yankees’ Legends Hospitality provides services at Manchester City’s home stadium. As Howard Megdal reported for Sports On Earth, the New York Mets were once considered by MLS as the group that would team with a partner for a new New York pro soccer team. The Mets’ financial difficulties made that impossible, which opened the door for the Yankees. Read the rest of this entry »

Some weeks, there are major developments in the business of baseball — like a team signing a new local TV contract. Some weeks, there are little developments on the big developments. My posts tend to focus on the big developments, but that leaves you in the dark on the little developments, unless those little developments become big developments down the road.

Dollars & Sense keeps you up to date on the smaller stories that are important but may not justify a separate post. Today, we have news on attendance through the first quarter of the seasons and expanded in replay in 2014.

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Senator John McCain introduced a bill in the Senate last week which aims to ban local TV blackouts for sporting events played in publicly-financed stadiums. But don’t get too excited baseball fans. The bill is aimed NFL blackout rules, for the most part. MLB blackouts due to the crazy MLB blackout map won’t change under this proposed legislation. The Fox Game of the Week blackouts on Saturdays may be covered, but those will disappear in 2014 anyway under the new Fox/MLB national TV contract.

Dubbed the Television Consumer Fairness Act of 2013, McCain’s bill proposed legislation has three goals:
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We’re only five-plus weeks into the season. Each team has at least 128 games left to play. It’s not too early, though, to talk about players who might be trade targets this summer, as teams fall out of contention. (Is it ever too early, really? This is what we dream up all day long, right?)

Today, we’re going to focus on players with no-trade clauses on teams that may very well be sellers come mid-July. That means starting with the Phillies. Philadelphia has several expensive players who could be quite valuable to contenders down stretch. All of them have no-trade clauses.

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Major League Baseball introduced interleague play in 1997, in part to boost interest in the game after the 1994 season was cut short by the players’ strike. More than 15 years after the first interleague game between the Giants and the Rangers at The Ballpark at Arlington, MLB continues to boast about attendance at interleague games. Last season, the average attendance at interleague games was 34,693, the highest since 2008, when 35,587 fans, on average, attended interleague games.

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