Did anybody see...

[Dakota]

I happen to agree with your view that the judiciary overstepped, but (IMO) if the owners, led by the pretend commissioner, had not engaged in unfair labor practices and other shenanigans, the judge would not have had the excuse.

As to the antitrust exception, since when does a private business even need be concerned with antitrust issues with how it handles internal financial issues? Antitrust concerns how a company colludes with competitors (e.g price fixing or market dividing) or how it tries to engage in monolopy practices with competitors. The problem with this model of business behavior with professional sports teams is that no MLB team is a BUSINESS competitor of any other... they are sports competitors but not business competitors. This is easy to demonstrate: what would the NY Yankee$ do if they drove all of the other MLB teams out of business? The business entity in professional sports is the league, not the individual team. This also means that the whole free agent system is also a misapplication of federal labor law to professional sports. JMO.