FanPost

Teachers Wanted: The Anti-Trust Exemption

I am very naive about the topic of baseball's anti-trust exemption, and anti-trust exemptions in general.

AN is such a valuable, highly intelligent readership, and I'm hoping it can help me learn a lot about this topic. Unfortunately, anytime I read something online about it - even a wikipedia page - it's written at a level that is above my level of reading comprehension and I don't have enough background knowledge I can apply to make it stick. I'm like a high-school freshman thrown into Algebra that probably belongs in a sixth- or seventh-grade math class working on multiplication tables and long division; you can throw 10 high-level law articles at me, but I probably need to start somewhere further back to really understand it.

Here's a few questions to help guide the responses, and the more people who give their two cents, the better:

1. What exactly is an anti-trust exemption? Why is it advantageous for a business or organization to have one?

2. Why does MLB have one, and none of the other major professional sports league do? I can't tell what makes MLB different than the rest.

3. The Supreme Court recently received a case related to the NFL that involves anti-trust exemption implications - here's an article about it. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/13/AR2010011304394_pf.html What does this article mean?