The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected the city of San Jose's antitrust lawsuit against Major League Baseball, an action filed as part of the city's long-running effort to become the new home of the Oakland A's.
San Jose sued MLB in 2013, saying team owners had violated federal antitrust law by effectively blocking an A's move to the South Bay. The San Francisco Giants hold territorial rights to the region, ceded to them by Athletics' owners in the 1990s, and have refused to allow the move.
The city's lawsuit is focused mostly on what the U.S. Supreme Court has termed "an established aberration" in its past rulings -- one that exempts Major League Baseball from antitrust law. That exemption was sanctified by a 1922 decision written by Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, which essentially found that baseball was exempt from antitrust restrictions that applied to other interstate commerce because it was a game, not a business.
In a landmark 1971 decision, Flood v. Kuhn, the Supreme Court declined to upset the precedent, commenting that it was up to Congress to change the sport's antitrust status.