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Louisville Colonels. After the 1948 season, he was traded to the Yankees’ organization. He struggled in 1949 after being sent from Triple-A Newark to the Oakland Oaks of the Triple-A Pacific Coast League. The following year, the Yankees demoted him to Class A Binghamton. Toolson refused to report to Binghamton and on May 25, 1950, was placed on the ineligible list. He returned home to California and worked as a film printer for a Hollywood studio. Blacklisted from the game, he challenged the reserve clause in federal court.
    After two lower courts rejected Toolson’s lawsuit by relying on Federal Baseball , the Supreme Court agreed to hear Toolson’s case and combined it with two other unsuccessful baseball lawsuits. Toolson and his co-plaintiffs argued before the Court that radio and television broadcasts, train and air travel, and the expansion of the minor leagues had left no question that baseball was interstate commerce.
    The Supreme Court, however, is extremely reluctant to reverse its own decisions. It is a principle known as stare decisis , which means “let the decision stand.” Supreme Court decisions, or precedents, are interpretations of American law that are relied on year after year by judges, lawyers, businessmen, and scholars. This is particularly true when the Court interprets the meaning of federal legislation such as the Sherman Act. The general immutability of these decisions is based on stare decisis .
    The Court in 1953 included some of the best and brightest justices. Chief Justice Earl Warren, an Eisenhower nominee, had recently joined such legal luminaries as Hugo Black, William Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert Jackson. A year later, the Court unanimously declared in Brown v. Board of Education that racially “separate but equal” public schools were “inherently unequal” and therefore unconstitutional. Brown reversed the Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, proving that stare decisis was not insurmountable. When it came to Toolson , however, Warren, Black, Douglas, Frankfurter, and Jackson were among the seven justices who voted in Major League Baseball’s favor.
    The Court’s unsigned, one-paragraph opinion in Toolson refused to reexamine the “underlying issues” about whether Major League Baseball in 1953 had risen to the level of interstate commerce. It claimed to be a reaffirmation of Holmes’s opinion in Federal Baseball . Yet, in a single paragraph, it completely changed Federal Baseball ’s meaning. The Court in Toolson offered three additional reasons for baseball’s legal monopoly:
    1. Congress had done nothing to correct Federal Baseball despite hearings in 1951 about baseball’s monopoly status;
    2. Baseball had developed for the last 30 years under Federal Baseball and had relied on the assumption that it was a legal monopoly; and
    3. Any future action on baseball’s antitrust exemption should be taken by Congress.
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One commentator described Toolson as the first step in “the greatest bait-and-switch scheme in the history of the Supreme Court.” The key to the “scheme” consisted of the second half of the opinion’s final sentence,a last-minute addition to the unsigned opinion. “Without reexamining the underlying issues, the judgments below are affirmed on the authority of Federal Baseball . . . ,” Toolson concluded, “ so far as that decision determines that Congress had no intention of including the business of baseball within the scope of the federal antitrust laws.” But Holmes never said anything in Federal Baseball about what Congress had intended in 1890, only that professional baseball as it operated in 1922 was not interstate commerce. The second half of this final sentence was recently discovered to be the handiwork of the Court’s new chief justice, Earl Warren. Warren was extremely uncomfortable with the opinion, which had been written by