On the heels of the trade deadline, Rob Johnson of IJ reports on some baseball news. But it doesn’t concern the latest in Major League Baseball. Instead, it’s about the business of baseball and how broad is the “business of baseball” exemption from the antitrust laws. There’s a baseball league in Puerto Rico that gave some pretty rough justice to an owner, who then took the league to court. Does the history and tradition of “baseball’s” exemption from antitrust laws apply to this league, or only to the American and National leagues back on the Mainland? Rob brings us the First Circuit’s answer and does so with the objective dispassion of a football fan. Then your host takes us out west for an unsolvable problem involving wild horses crisscrossing public and private lands in Wyoming. Are those horses actually “wild”? Doesn’t really matter to Congress, which mandates pretty impossible things that force the Tenth Circuit to send the government back through the administrative process. Then we close with some hot gossip: There’s no joy in Mudville.

Short Circuit 387 | The Business of Baseball