Over the last couple years, the battle for higher wages for minor league baseball players has been fought on several legal fronts. The highest profile challenge has come in the form of litigation claiming that the minor league pay scale — under which minor league players often earn as little as $3,000 to $7,500 per year — violates the nation’s minimum wage laws.

At the same time, however, a separate lawsuit filed last December attacked the problem from a different legal angle. In Miranda v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, four former minor league players asserted that Major League Baseball’s minor league pay practices violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. In particular, the players argued that MLB and its thirty teams have illegally conspired to fix minor league players’ salaries at below-market rates not only by agreeing to a uniform, league-wide salary scale for minor league players, but also by artificially reducing the size of the signing bonuses that entry-level players receive under MLB’s domestic and international signing bonus pool rules.

As I noted at the time the Miranda case was filed last year, the plaintiffs in the suit faced at least one major impediment in their attempt to challenge the minor league pay practices under the Sherman Act: baseball’s antitrust exemption. Indeed, soon after the case was filed, MLB filed a motion asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit in light of its antitrust immunity.

Given that precedent, it should come as little surprise that Judge Haywood Gilliam dismissed the Miranda suit on Monday, concluding that MLB was shielded from the plaintiffs’ claims by virtue of its antitrust exemption.

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Major League Baseball’s pay practices have faced a series of legal challenges in recent years. The most notable of these cases center around allegations that MLB teams routinely fail to pay minor-league players in accordance with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the nation’s primary minimum wage and overtime law.

While the minor-league wage lawsuits have certainly generated the most attention to date, they were not the first in the recent wave of minimum-wage cases filed against MLB over the last few years. Instead, that distinction belongs to Chen v. Major League Baseball, a lawsuit alleging that MLB violated the FLSA by employing unpaid volunteers to work at the annual FanFest convention held in conjunction with the All-Star Game in New York City back in 2013.

The district court granted MLB an initial victory in the Chen case last year, determining that FanFest was not subject to the FLSA and therefore was immune from the federal minimum wage and overtime requirements. Now, in a recent decision issued earlier this month, MLB has scored yet another victory with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the trial court’s finding that the FLSA does not apply to FanFest.

However, while the Chen decision certainly represents an important decision with respect to the rights of FanFest volunteers, the appellate court’s recent opinion appears unlikely to have a significant impact on the other minimum-wage lawsuits pending against the league. Therefore, the various lawsuits challenging both MLB’s minor league and scout pay practices remain very much alive despite the recent rulings in the FanFest case.

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During the height of the furor over the National Football League’s mishandling of the Ray Rice case last fall, both Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association agreed to work together to formulate a new domestic violence policy for the league. On Friday, the two sides announced that they had finally reached an agreement on a new comprehensive policy covering not only incidents of domestic violence, but cases of sexual assault and child abuse as well:

MLB and the MLBPA have announced an agreement on a Joint Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy. pic.twitter.com/C1eTGljC6r

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) August 21, 2015

In addition to establishing new player treatment and education protocols, the policy gives the Commissioner’s Office the authority to investigate any allegation of domestic violence, sexual assault, or child abuse involving a major-league player. Commissioner Manfred has also been given the power to place a player under investigation on paid Administrative Leave for up to seven days, a placement that the player can immediately appeal to panel of arbitrators.

Following the completion of MLB’s investigation, the new policy gives the commissioner the power to impose whatever punishment “he believes is appropriate in light of the severity of the conduct.” In other words, the agreement does not establish any minimum or maximum penalties for domestic violence, sexual assault, or child abuse cases. In fact, the policy explicitly states that a player does not even need to be criminally convicted of a crime in order to be punished by the commissioner. Once again, however, the player will have the right to appeal his punishment to a panel of arbitrators.

So how does MLB’s new policy compare with the league’s prior treatment of domestic violence? And what types of penalties might players realistically face if the commissioner determines they have violated the new agreement?

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Major League Baseball’s arcane – and many would say horribly outdated – television blackout policy has long been a source of frustration for baseball fans. As most readers are by now well aware, under MLB’s existing rules, fans residing within each team’s designated “local” broadcasting territory are currently unable to view that team’s games over the Internet via the MLB.tv streaming service. Instead, fans must subscribe to whichever regional sports network (RSN) owns the rights to the team’s games in order to watch their local team play.

These restrictions impact fans in a variety of ways. For starters, the existing rules prevent fans from watching their local team play on mobile devices, instead only allowing fans to view their local team’s games on a traditional television set. So anyone hoping to watch their local team’s broadcast via cell phone, for instance, is out of luck under the league’s existing rules.

Perhaps more frustrating, though, is the impact that MLB’s blackout policy has on fans who are either currently unable – or simply unwilling – to subscribe to whichever RSN owns the rights to their designated local team’s games. Under MLB’s policy, even if these fans shell out $110-130 per year to subscribe to MLB.tv, they will still be blacked out from watching any game involving their local team, even if they cannot watch the game on their local cable system.

So when news broke on Monday that MLB and Fox are nearing a deal to allow in-market streaming for 15 teams’ games, some fans were undoubtedly excited to learn that baseball was apparently, at long last, fully embracing the new digital age.

Unfortunately, in reality, the MLB-Fox agreement will do little to solve the most frequent criticisms of MLB’s blackout policy, as the scope of the new deal appears to be much more modest than some initial headlines suggested.

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Dating back to at least 1999, Major League Baseball has made it a stated goal to increase the level of diversity in the highest levels of its teams’ front office operations. Under the so-called “Selig Rule,” MLB teams are required to consider female or minority candidates “for all general manager, assistant general manager, field manager, director of player development and director of scouting positions.”

Notably, the Selig Rule does not require that teams actually interview any female or minority candidates for these positions. Instead, teams must merely consider candidates belonging to an underrepresented group before hiring someone else to fill one of the five aforementioned positions. Along these lines, teams are required to provide the Commissioner’s office with a list of everyone that they internally considered for an applicable job.

Sixteen years later, the extent to which the Selig Rule has succeeded in increasing the level of diversity within MLB teams’ front office operations depends on one’s point of view. On the one hand, the number of female and minority employees in MLB teams’ front offices reportedly increased from around three percent in 1999 to 20 percent in 2013. On the other hand, today only two MLB teams employ a manager belonging to an underrepresented minority group – Seattle’s Lloyd McClendon and Atlanta’s Fredi Gonzalez – while 26 of the 30 MLB general managers are white males (the only exceptions being the Diamondbacks’ Dave Stewart, the Dodgers’ Farhan Zaidi, the Phillies’ Ruben Amaro Jr., and the Tigers’ recently hired Al Avila).

Despite this mixed success, the league is committed to continuing to increase the levels of diversity in its teams’ front office ranks. In a new initiative announced last week, MLB has hired the Korn Ferry consulting firm to help prepare minority and female candidates to interview this off-season for any of the five categories of jobs covered by the Selig Rule.

While this new initiative will undoubtedly help those candidates who are eligible to work with the consulting firm, it nevertheless seems unlikely to have a significant impact on the representation of female and minority candidates within MLB.

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This is the second installment in an occasional series examining baseball’s antitrust exemption. The first piece in the series looked at the historical evolution of the exemption, and in particular the U.S. Supreme Court’s evolving justification for baseball’s antitrust immunity. A future, final post will consider the practical impact that the exemption has had on Major League Baseball’s operations.

While many fans are aware that baseball is generally exempt from antitrust law, fewer realize that courts have adopted widely divergent views regarding the extent to which MLB’s operations are actually shielded from the law. For instance, just because MLB is generally immune from antitrust law does not mean that a court would necessarily give the league free reign to engage in anti-competitive practices in areas completely unrelated to professional baseball (such as if, for example, MLB Advanced Media — the league’s digital content distribution company — were to enter into a price-fixing scheme with other non-sports-related, Internet-streaming-video service providers).

Courts have traditionally disagreed regarding where to draw the line between MLB’s exempt and non-exempt conduct, and thus are deeply divided over the extent to which they will allow antitrust lawsuits to proceed against MLB. As a practical matter, then, anyone wishing to sue MLB under antitrust law may be able to do so – despite the league’s antitrust exemption – so long as they file their case in the right court.

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Following last month’s horrific incident at Fenway Park – when a woman suffered life-threatening injuries after being struck in the head by a fragment of a broken bat – it was probably only a matter of time until someone challenged Major League Baseball’s fan safety rules in court. A new class action lawsuit filed in California federal court on Monday does just that, accusing MLB of failing to take sufficient precautions to protect its fans from foul balls and broken bats.

The suit – filed on behalf of Gail Payne, an Oakland A’s season ticket holder – focuses in particular on fans sitting in unprotected seats along the first and third baselines, an area the complaint dubs the “Danger Zone.” According to the lawsuit, although MLB has known for years that fans seated in these sections face a heightened risk of serious injury, the league has failed to take any steps to protect them. The new suit hopes to force MLB to act, asking the court to order the league to mandate that all 30 teams install foul-pole-to-foul-pole netting by the start of next season.

Ultimately, however, Monday’s lawsuit appears unlikely to achieve its ambitious goal, as the case faces several legal hurdles that may prove quite difficult to overcome.

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MLB’s pay practices have come under considerable scrutiny in recent years. In 2013 and 2014, the U.S. Department of Labor launched a series of investigations examining whether several MLB teams violated the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by failing to pay their clubhouse attendants, administrative workers, and interns in accordance with the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime requirements.

At the same time, MLB has also been hit with four different lawsuits over the last two years alleging that the league’s pay practices violate the FLSA and/or federal antitrust law. The most notable of these cases were two suits filed last year contending that MLB teams routinely fail to pay their minor-league players either the minimum wage or overtime. Those cases – which assert that minor leaguers often earn as little as $3,300 per year – currently remain pending against 22 MLB teams.

Now, yet another group of MLB employees is coming forward to challenge MLB’s pay practices. In a new class action lawsuit filed last week in New York federal court, former Kansas City Royals scout Jordan Wyckoff contends that MLB teams have unlawfully agreed not to compete with one another for the services of their amateur and professional scouts. As a result, the suit – Wyckoff v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball – asserts that a number of MLB scouts currently make less than the minimum wage and are not paid overtime, even when working more than 40 hours in a given week.

Wyckoff alleges that these practices not only violate the FLSA, but that they fail to comply with both federal and state antitrust law as well.

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Overshadowed by last week’s series of momentous decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, Major League Baseball recently filed a brief with the Court urging it to reject an appeal by the city of San Jose, California in the on-going dispute over the future home of the Oakland Athletics. As I noted at the time San Jose filed its appeal back in April, the city is hoping to challenge MLB’s refusal to approve the proposed relocation of the A’s to the city in court under the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Over the last two years, however, both the trial court and court of appeals have dismissed San Jose’s suit in light of professional baseball’s nearly century-old antitrust exemption. The city is now asking the Supreme Court to take its appeal and overturn the controversial doctrine in order to hold MLB accountable under the Sherman Act, like all of the other major U.S. professional sports leagues.

As one might expect, MLB’s brief instead argues that San Jose’s appeal should be rejected for several reasons. In particular, MLB devotes much of the first half of its brief to the contention that San Jose lacks standing to sue — a requirement in which the plaintiff must show that it has a personal stake in the outcome of an actual legal case or controversy (as opposed to a hypothetical, future dispute) — and therefore can’t sustain its case against the league.

MLB challenges San Jose’s standing on several grounds. The primary basis of MLB’s attack, however, focuses on a recent California state court decision holding that an option agreement between the city and the A’s for the land on which a new stadium is to be built is invalid under various state and municipal laws. Specifically, the California court determined that San Jose had illegally transferred the land to a governmental authority in an attempt to circumvent laws requiring that a public referendum be held to approve the use of any tax dollars to build a sports facility.

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In the aftermath of yesterday’s shocking news that the FBI is investigating the St. Louis Cardinals for allegedly illegally accessing the Houston Astros’ computer network without authorization, many fans have begun to speculate as to what sort of penalty the Cardinals might face from Major League Baseball. MLB has already suggested that some form of punishment is forthcoming, issuing the following statement yesterday in response to the New York Times’ initial report:

Major League Baseball has been aware of and has fully cooperated with the federal investigation into the illegal breach of the Astros’ baseball operations database. Once the investigative process has been completed by federal law enforcement officials, we will evaluate the next steps and will make decisions promptly.

In particular, as others have noted, MLB’s reference to the incident as an “illegal breach” – as opposed to an “alleged” illegal breach – is especially noteworthy. MLB isn’t denying that employees of one of its teams may have illegally accessed the Astros’ computer network, nor is the league holding off judgment on the veracity of the reports until the federal investigation is complete. Instead, the league office is explicitly acknowledging that an illegal breach has occurred.

So the Cardinals are almost certainly facing some form of MLB-imposed punishment on top of any potential criminal charges the government may pursue. The question now is just what type of punishment MLB and Commissioner Manfred will seek to impose.

Given the unprecedented nature of the incident, initial speculation has ranged anywhere from a steep fine or the loss of draft picks to a potential postseason ban for the Cardinals. However, while Commissioner Manfred certainly has broad authority to govern the sport under his “best interests of baseball” powers, his authority – as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has learned in recent years – is not absolute. Instead, MLB’s league constitution and collective bargaining agreement both impose some real constraints on the commissioner’s ability to punish the Cardinals. Read the rest of this entry »