Saturday, June 7, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.
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Major League Baseball and its players union lost a major case in the U.S. Supreme Court this week. The justices let stand a lower-court ruling that said fantasy sports leagues had a free-speech right to use player names and statistics.
Professional baseball claimed it had legal control over player names and statistics and for years it charged companies that run fantasy sports leagues a licensing fee of 5 percent to 10 percent of their revenue.
Fantasy sports leagues allow people to act as “owners” of a team. The owners pay a fee to participate and draft players. The owners win or lose based on the cumulative statistics of their players.
Three years ago the MLB restricted the number of licenses it granted and cut out a Missouri company that at the time had 250,000 customers. The company sued — and won.
The company overcame significant opposition. The National Basketball Association, the National Football League and the National Hockey League all supported professional baseball’s claim that no one should be able to “exploit players’ identity for commercial gain.”
A lower court noted that what the fantasy leagues do is hardly exploitative — they merely use names and statistics that are readily available from any number of sources.
Baseball wasn’t worried about players’ being exploited; it was worried about money. In its zeal to maximize profits from fans, professional baseball went too far. Statistics are the lifeblood of the sport. They are compared, debated and dissected by fans and have fueled fan interest for generations.
The MLB’s stance has left a bad taste in the mouths of many fans, who already pay a small fortune for a day at the ballpark.
Had professional baseball won the lawsuit, what would be next? Telling a 12-year-old boy he can’t speak of slugger David Ortiz’s numbers without sending his lunch money to the MLB?
It is no wonder that baseball has been supplanted by football as the national pastime. Baseball officials should be encouraging fans, not shaking them down.
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