RIP, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn

I should have posted on this yesterday, but I came late to the New York Times obit of former Commissioner of Major League Baseball Bowie Kuhn, who died Thursday at age 80.

Kuhn's name is familiar to most law students because he was the named respondent in Flood v. Kuhn, the 1971 case in which the United States Supreme Court rejected former player Curt Flood's challenge to the Reserve System, holding (actually, reaffirming an 80-year-old holding that the Court thought was wrong) that Major League Baseball was not subject to federal antitrust laws. For both student and professor, that opinion is either fun or ridiculous (depending on one's point of view) because all of Part I was an ode, written by Justice Blackmun, to the history and majesty of baseball. It included a listing of many great players of the pre-WW II era. Chief Justice Burger and Justice White refused to join that part of the opinion and, the story goes, Justice Marshall demanded that Blackmun include some Negro League players. Dean Roger Abrams, one of the leading sports-law scholars, recently wrote a paper on the players listed in the opinion.

What I think is noteworthy about Bowie Kuhn is that he may be the last independent baseball commissioner to serve for a substantial period. He was willing to wield his "Best Interests of Baseball" powers against the owners who, as a legal and practical matter, employ him. As the Times story describes, Kuhn repeatedly took on owners in a way I am not sure Bud Selig or whomever replaces him two years from now will be willing or able to do. Most notably, Kuhn wielded his "Best Interests" powers to void a series of deals when Oakland A's owner Charlie Finley tried to sell off the star players from his championship teams to avoid losing them to the early days of free agency.

Kuhn's commissionership is historically significant (arguably the second most historical, after Landis and before Selig) because of the massive changes that occurred on his watch. Some were for good (increasing attendance, increased television viewership, a fair labor system), some were for ill (multiple work stoppages and lingering racial tensions in the game) and some were for very ill (have you checked out the uniforms teams wore in the 1970s?).

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