Not really, but I thought it was a cute way to introduce this Atlantic article on “How Justice Stevens Changed Baseball,” by Henry D. Fetter, author of Taking on the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball.
In 1951, the future Justice Stevens was a young antitrust lawyer in Chicago when he was tapped to serve as associate counsel to the Monopoly Power Subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee by Edward H. Levi, who was the dean of the University of Chicago Law School and serving as Chief Counsel to the subcommittee. (It was not the last time that Levi would steer Stevens’s career path. A quarter-century later, as President Ford’s Attorney General, Levi would be instrumental in securing Stevens’s nomination to the Supreme Court.) Among the industries targeted for congressional investigation–along with such glamorous headline-grabbers as newsprint, paper pulp, and aluminum–was organized baseball.
The inquiry had been triggered by baseball’s own request for legislation to codify and immunize from any future judicial attack the antitrust exemption that the Supreme Court had extended in 1922….
The 1951 hearings proved to be a turning point in the history of American sports. They had a more enduring impact than the much better remembered piece of that year’s baseball history: Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard round the world” that won the 1951 National League pennant playoff for the New York Giants. Never before had the business of a major league sport become the lead story on the nation’s sports pages, spilling over, indeed, onto the front page. The business of sports had become, and ever after would be, the public’s business as well.
Stevens retired from the Supreme Court on June 29.
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