Jim Bunning Quotes
The time has come to disregard the exemption. Baseball is no longer a sport.
Commenting on Baseball's anti-trust exemption:
Jim Bunning, U. S. Congressman (Republican, KY), Professional Baseball Player, Quoted in New York Times, December 13, 1992
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This line was a takeoff on the famous quotation of Karl Marx: {624064}.
Congress had exempted Professional Baseball from the Anti-Trust laws and players were bought and sold with no say in the process. Flood made history by challenging the practice. He lost in the Supreme Court which ruled that Congress had exempted baseball, however he was eventually vindicated when the reserve clause fell in 1975
Legally, Stark was wrong. The sports franchises belong to the owner except for the Green Bay Packers football team. The Dodgers were making very good money but the owner thought he could make even more in Los Angeles, but as many professional teams do, he offered to stay in Brooklyn if the City would provide major subsidies to him. The City would not be blackmailed and the Dodgers were no more.
Even in the 19th century, cities felt that professional sports teams were a benefit and a source of pride. That was before the era when sports team owners demanded payments from the cities to stay in that locality and the cities began to realize that the cost was greater than the benefit. Latrobe was a 7 term mayor who was eventually ousted by his own party, The baseball team to which he referred was the precursor of the Baltimore Orioles. At the time, the Chesapeake Bay produced the finest oysters and shipped them all over the continent in huge quantities. This was before the farming run off and chicken waste polluted the bay shrinking the oyster harvest to a small fraction of its 19th century yield.
Note the fact that there was a baseball contest and a chess match.
When he announced he would run for a second term as New York's governor, he was asked by reporters if he would rule out running for the presidency:
James Paul David Bunning was an American professional baseball pitcher and politician who represented Kentucky in both chambers of the United States Congress. He was the sole Major League Baseball athlete to have been elected to both the United States Senate and the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
