Major League Baseball did not grow into an $8 billion business over the last two decades without burying some bodies along the way. There's a mass grave in Iowa. Plenty more scattered throughout Las Vegas. A few in North Carolina. Some in Buffalo. Lots strewn about Canada. Everywhere in Hawaii. That was the price for baseball fattening itself on television money: poor fans who just want to watch a ballgame but can't because of MLB's greed and gluttony.

Here we are. Still. Years later. It's 2012. We can watch anything we want anywhere we want on any device we want at any time we want. Except baseball games. If you live in Iowa, you can't see the Brewers, Cardinals, Cubs, Royals, Twins or White Sox. It's just as ugly in Vegas: no A's, Angels, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Giants or Padres. Baseball continues to black out televised games in these areas because of territorial-rights rules conceived when TV was black and white and people actually watched commercials.

And it's more evident than ever why baseball does it: to protect its relationship with the regional sports networks that are paying billions of dollars for the exclusive rights to broadcast games in demarcated territories. It's a business deal that enriches MLB, the networks and cable companies while passing on every last dime to fans – and leaving tens of millions unable to see their favorite team play.

View photos

Preying on the very consumer who wants to buy your product seems like the antithesis of good business sense, and yet baseball has done nothing to change its tack. Commissioner Bud Selig said: "We'll figure it out. … We have to do something about it."

That was six years ago.

Since then, television-based revenue has become baseball's lifeblood, bringing in far more than ticket sales, merchandising, concessions and sponsorships. Live sports programming is DVR-proof and immensely valuable to advertisers, enough that a club in bankruptcy, the Los Angeles Dodgers, fetched $2.15 billion when sold in April. The revocation of the current blackout rules grows unlikelier by the billion.

Unless, that is, four fans and an armada of lawyers can reverse the most inane, arcane rule in sports.





On the first page of a complaint filed May 9 in Manhattan, two words aim squarely for Major League Baseball's jaw and deliver a swift blow: "Illegal cartel."



Garber et al v. MLB is a class-action antitrust suit looking to do what no amount of complaining from baseball fans could: destroy the blackout rules. Four fans – Fernanda Garber, Marc Lerner, Derek Rasmussen and Robert Silver – are suing MLB, MLB Advanced Media (which runs the MLB.tv service), DirecTV, nine teams and eight stations that broadcast games. They claim baseball "colluded" by packaging its out-of-market games together via the Extra Innings and MLB.tv offerings and that the league and its partners "exploit their illegal monopoly by charging supra-competitive prices."

The basis of the argument is simple: By dividing up territories and setting fixed prices, MLB is in violation of the Sherman Act. If baseball is indeed breaking antitrust laws, its entire business model goes kaboom. And so while lawsuits stream into 245 Park Avenue frequently, this is one, according to a number of sources, the league is taking very seriously.

Story continues