Political Quotes

“Yesterday the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Business Rights and Competition of the Committee on the Judiciary voted out S.627, the Hatch-Thurmond-Leahy bill clarifying the application of our antitrust laws to major league baseball. What we did was to remove the antitrust exemption given to major league baseball. I hope that the full Judiciary Committee, the Senate and the other body will take this up and pass it relatively soon. Baseball has for decades had a special exemption from the antitrust laws, which laws apply to everything else, every other business in this country and every other professional sport. What this means is that baseball and those who own it and run it are basically above the law. Now they have shown what this means. They have shown great disdain for the fans, for those who do not make the $1 million salaries, like the people who park the cars, that sell peanuts and beer and hot dogs and soda at the various stadiums, for the communities that have taxed their people through bond issues to build stadiums, for those who make the pennants and the T-shirts and the baseball caps, and even, in the State of Vermont, those who make the souvenir bats given out on bat day. Such people have been out of jobs over the past year because of the baseball strike. And throughout all of this, people, some acting in extremely high-handed fashion, are able to say, 'Well, the fans be damned.'”