Two justices (Stanley Forman Reed and Harold Hitz Burton) dissented from the short, unsigned per curiam majority opinion, arguing MLB and its revenue sources had changed enough since 1922 that the logic of that case no longer applied.

[1] When the Newark franchise was dissolved prior to the 1950 season, he was demoted by the Yankees' organization to the Binghamton Triplets, an A-class team within its minor league system.

In 1951, Representative Emanuel Celler, an advocate for strong antitrust enforcement, chaired a special Judiciary Committee subcommittee on monopoly power, which had looked into baseball, among other things.

The Supreme Court granted certiorari to hear it and consider a number of other cases by former Mexican League players pending at the appellate level.

When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Boston Red Sox filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the Yankees, their bitter rival.

A one-paragraph unsigned per curiam opinion was followed by a longer dissent by Justice Harold Hitz Burton, joined by Stanley Forman Reed.

Without reexamination of the underlying issues, the judgments below are affirmed ... 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.

He conceded "the major asset which baseball is to our Nation, the high place it enjoys in the hearts of our people, and the possible justification of special treatment for organized sports which are engaged in interstate trade or commerce".

He concluded "The present popularity of organized baseball increases, rather than diminishes, the importance of its compliance with standards of reasonableness comparable with those now required by law of interstate trade or commerce.

"[13] Within the next few terms, Toolson's logic was criticized directly and indirectly by other justices, including some who had been in the majority, in dissents from opinions in which the Court held that it was specific to baseball and that even other professional sports weren't covered.

"I cannot translate even the narrowest conception of stare decisis into the equivalent of writing into the Sherman Law an exemption of baseball to the exclusion of every other sport different not one legal jot or tittle from it.

"[20] In 1970, St. Louis Cardinals star center fielder Curt Flood decided to refuse a trade to the Philadelphia Phillies and challenge the reserve clause again.

"[22] In that case's majority opinion, Harry Blackmun conceded that the facts no longer supported the exemption and that baseball was indeed interstate commerce,[23] but echoed Clark in suggesting that the consequences of overturning the previous decisions would be worse than letting it stand.

[25]Much of the criticism of Toolson over the years has viewed it as the middle term of the sequence that begins with Federal Baseball Club and ends with Flood, and considers it in that context.

It is as if the majority in Toolson imagined Senator Sherman announcing that "today we enact the Magna Carta of the working class so that all American business will respect the right of consumers to free and open competition ... that is, um, except for organized baseball, of course."