Bud Selig is loving this September. For somebody as hopelessly old-school as he wants people to believe he is, Selig adores this new playoff format that has more than half the teams harboring postseason dreams. Engaged fans, meaningful games, great debates, money-money-money – baseball at its Seligian finest.

If only everyone could watch it.

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One of Selig's great tenets as commissioner for two decades now has been inclusion and equality. Why that same ethos doesn't apply to Major League Baseball's rules that black out the most important games this year from millions of televisions around the country remains a slice of hypocrisy he is unwilling to remedy.

Soon, thankfully, he may have no choice.

The May 9 antitrust suit filed by four fans against MLB and the National Hockey League is nearing a critical moment, when federal Judge Shira Scheindlin, of New York's Southern District, could decide whether she'll hear the trial. Sometime Friday, baseball will file a brief in Garber et al v. MLB that tries to convince Scheindlin to dismiss the case.

Sports law experts versed in Garber et al v. MLB don't see that outcome as likely – and do believe the plaintiffs' case is strong enough to at least force MLB to reconsider the antiquated policy that leaves some areas with as many as six games a night blacked out because the league refuses to rid itself of the absurd territorial rights that govern its broadcasting schedule.

"I don't think they're going to agree to radically change things," said Michael McCann, director of the Vermont School of Law's Sports Law Institute and a legal analyst for Sports Illustrated. "I don't think they're going to be intimidated by this – yet. But that's one benefit of filing a lawsuit. It sometimes encourages 'voluntary' responses."

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This is not a normal antitrust case, in which the division of a market happens in secret and the question is whether parties have conspired to set prices. Sports leagues are unique businesses in which teams that compete against one another pool everything from corporate advertising to broadcasting revenues to their greatest product – the postseason.

Consequently, the plaintiffs' goal is to show that by packaging its out-of-market games via Extra Innings on TV or MLB.tv on the Web, and continuing to black out places as disparate as Iowa, Las Vegas, Buffalo and Hawaii, baseball has unfairly restrained trade. Case law supports their contention, according to experts, with the American Needle v. NFL decision by the Supreme Court ensuring the league can't band together as one business instead of 30 separate companies.

One of MLB's chief arguments – blackout rules do not equal restraint of trade – could have trouble holding up in court, as could the idea that it's competing against the NFL, NBA, movies and other forms of entertainment, not with each other.

"Their argument is they're not trying to do this to hurt fans," said Gabe Feldman, a law professor and director of Tulane Sports Law Program. "They're not doing this to hurt individual teams. They're doing this for the better of the sport and fans."

The truth is much simpler: Baseball is doing this because the obscene amounts of money networks will pay for exclusive broadcasting rights. We saw this in action recently, with Fox, Turner and ESPN combining to spend $12 billion for the next eight years of national broadcasts. Live sports prints TV money, and local blackouts reinforce the idea of exclusivity: either buy the cable/satellite package that includes the channel on which the games are broadcast or run the risk of not seeing them.

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