SAN FRANCISCO -- Major League Baseball is dragging its feet on having team owners vote on the Oakland Athletics' proposed move to a new ballpark 40 miles south in San Jose, San Jose city officials said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The lawsuit -- filed in federal court in San Jose -- is disputing MLB's exemption from federal antitrust law, which MLB has used as a "guise" to control the location of teams, according to the suit.

"It's time for someone to take on this supposed baseball exemption from antitrust laws," said attorney Phil Gregory of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, the law firm representing the city. "The City of San Jose is a perfect candidate to make that challenge."

The San Francisco Giants have objected to the A's potential move on grounds they relied on territorial rights to the San Jose-area market when they built their ballpark, AT&T Park.

The A's say those rights were only meant to support the Giants' failed efforts in the early 1990s to build a San Jose-area ballpark themselves.

The lawsuit contends that such territorial rights, regardless of the team, reduce competition and harm consumers.

Giants spokeswoman Staci Slaughter declined to comment.

MLB commissioner Bud Selig appointed a committee more than four years ago to study the A's potential move.

He rejected a proposal earlier this year from San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed to sit down and talk about the A's plans and said Reed's reference to additional litigation at the time was "neither productive nor consistent with process that the Athletics have initiated under our rules."