| Baseball Antitrust Quotes |
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Quotes by baseball owners and officials on the sport's financial status:
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| "Professional baseball is on the wane. Salaries must come down or the interest of the public must be increased in some way. If one or the other does not happen, bankruptcy stares every team in the face." |
| -- Chicago White Stockings owner Albert Spalding, 1881. |
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| "Unless something happens, we're all going to be out of business. When you have as many teams as there are losing money, something has got to give." |
| -- Cleveland Indians chairman Patrick J. O'Neill, Feb. 27, 1985. |
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| "The one thing we know today is we can't continue to do business the way we have in the past." |
| -- acting commissioner Bud Selig. Dec. 9, 1992. |
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| "You can debate the numbers, but you can't debate a minimum of 12 to 14 (teams that lose money). And we just can't ignore that anymore." |
| -- Selig, Aug. 7, 1994. |
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| "There are many franchises today, and again I could begin to articulate them one by one, who have deep trouble. ... We have a remarkable number of teams losing a lot of money." |
| -- Selig, in testimony to a House subcommittee, Sept. 22, 1994. |
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| "The economic landscape of the game must be changed, and the way we do business must be changed." |
| -- Selig, who had become commissioner, in testimony to a House subcommittee, Nov. 21, 2000. |
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| "You go through The Sporting News for the last 100 years, and you will find two things are always true. You never have enough pitching, and nobody ever made money." |
| -- players' association head Donald Fehr, 1995. |
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| "Anyone who quotes profits of a baseball club is missing the point. Under generally accepted accounting principles, I can turn a $4 million profit into a $2 million loss and I could get every national accounting firm to agree with me." |
| -- Paul Beeston, then a Toronto Blue Jays vice president, now baseball's chief operating officer, 1979. |
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