Thanks to the US Supreme Court, you may never have to make that offer to someone in your Fantasy Baseball league. But you should realize how close it came to being reality, and thank the men and women in black [robes] for that.
You see, Major League Baseball, which probably isn't above suing me for using that phrase on my blog, is always on the lookout for ways to take for itself a slice of revenue from every possible way in which human beings relate to professional sports. A number of years ago, a handful of baseball geeks started the first "rotisserie baseball" league, where they each pretended to have their own team of players. They followed "their" players by checking the box scores in the newspaper each day.
As you might have noticed, Fantasy Baseball caught on and is now a pretty significant subset of the American Pastime - and, as MLB argued, a pretty significant industry, too. So MLB claimed that Fantasy Baseball leagues needed to pay a licensing fee to "use" baseball players' names and statistics. (As the headline suggests, one way to get around this - as some early video games did - would be to come up with completely different [wink] player names and statistics.)
Well, the USSC refused to hear MLB's appeal of a lower court ruling that baseball players' names and statistics can be used without license from MLB. A triumph of common sense, if I do say so myself.
Think about it. MLB was suing to prevent its own biggest fans from keeping track, not only of the teams they like, but of specific players and the minutiae of those players' statistics. "Thank you for being such big fans of our product! You must now pay us even more of your hard-earned dollars for the privilege of being such a big fan!" The MLB Players Association showed just how bone-headed it could be by refusing, for years, to allow steroid testing. Was management just trying to beat the union in a game of moron one-upsmanship?
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