Crash Davis in Court — Do Minor Leaguers Have Valid Steroids Claims?

[WSJ_law_blog]

Indulge us for a moment, Law Blog readers. Let’s say you’re a career minor-league baseball player not unlike Crash Davis, Kevin Costner’s character in Bull Durham (pictured). Let’s say that year after year, you’ve put up good numbers (as they say) at the AAA level, one stop away from the majors, but you’ve never really gotten your shot at the big time (or the big money). Let’s also assume that you’ve never dabbled in performance-enhancing drugs but feel pretty strongly that some guys who’ve passed you on their way up to stardom haven’t always played fair and square. Is there anything you can do?

Of course there is! You can sue! That’s what ESPN columnist Rick Reilly proposes in a recent column.

The idea may sound a little bit out there, but to Reilly’s credit, he actually sized up what such a lawsuit might look like. Writes Reilly: “I think minor league players like Jones should file a class action, restraint of trade lawsuit against Major League Baseball because they sat stewing in the minors while big leaguers were allowed to cheat.”

For help putting together his hypothetical complaint, Reilly checked in with Stanford labor-law professor William Gould. According to Gould, a class of disgruntled minor-leaguers would have to show 1) a correlation between steroid use and better performance; 2) that MLB turned a blind eye to steroid use; and 3) “Nonstatutory labor examption considerations. (Reilly doesn’t pretend to understand what this means, claiming only that “a good shark would gobble it right up.”)

To be sure, Reilly’s a humor writer (and a pretty good one at that), so we can’t be entirely sure if he’d back up his idea tooth and nail. Any labor or antitrust lawyers out there care to weigh in?