These two books offer strikingly different approaches to similar topics. Both examine the legal history of professional baseball's longstanding exemption from federal antitrust law. Stuart Banner's The Baseball Trust surveys the entire history of baseball's exemption, starting in the late nineteenth century and continuing through today. A work of historical synthesis, the book covers a large amount of material in a briskly paced narrative filled with insights and choice details. Nathaniel Grow's Baseball on Trial, by contrast, favors depth over breadth. Its focus is the Supreme Court's first confrontation with baseball and antitrust law, the much-maligned 1922 Federal Baseball decision. The book provides a play-by-play reconstruction of the litigation battles between rival professional baseball organizations that culminated in the Federal Baseball ruling.

Baseball's exemption from antitrust laws is, Banner notes in the opening pages of The Baseball Trust, “one of the oddest features of our legal system” (xi). Not only are most industries accountable to antitrust regulations, but most professional sports are also. However, in Federal Baseball, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court that baseball was not interstate commerce, and that therefore, federal antitrust law, which rested on Congress's power under the Constitution's Commerce Clause, did not apply to professional baseball. The Court revisited the issue twice more, in 1953 and 1972, but each time the justices let the 1922 precedent stand. Although they no longer agreed with Holmes's conclusion that baseball was not a form of interstate commerce, the justices reasoned that it was for Congress, not the Court, to upset the apple cart and revoke the national pastime's jealously protected exemption.

Banner explains how the exemption took shape and why, despite being the target of constant criticism and appearing increasingly bizarre as baseball grew into the international multibillion dollar industry it is today, it has largely stood the test of time. He challenges the most common explanation, namely that baseball's special treatment in the American legal system can be attributable to baseball's special place in American culture. Banner offers two more persuasive alternatives. One is a story of industry influence: through its aggressive and savvy litigation and lobbying efforts, professional baseball has made the legal system work to its advantage. The other is a story of path dependency, which Banner summarizes in the following lovely sentence: “At each step, judges and legislators made decisions that were perfectly sensible when considered one at a time, but this series of decisions yielded an outcome that makes no sense at all” (xv).

The question at the heart of Baseball on Trial is a narrower one: how to explain Justice Holmes’ creation of the antitrust exemption in in the first place? Grow's answer is to offer a detailed narrative of the litigation behind Federal Baseball. He picks up the story in 1913, when the upstart Federal League attempted to establish itself as a third major league, alongside the American League and the National League. This led to a barrage of lawsuits between the leagues, one of which, after many years and many twists and turns, resulted in the Federal Baseball decision. Although Grow largely favors close description over analysis, in the book's epilogue he turns his attention to refuting commonplace critiques of Holmes’ decision (“not one of Mr. Justice Holmes's happiest days,” was how Judge Henry Friendly once put it). Not only did Holmes offer a defensible reading of Commerce Clause doctrine as it existed in 1922, but, Grow suggests, the lawyers who sought to challenge organized baseball's monopoly further weakened their case with various tactical errors.

Reading these two books together puts in sharp relief a perennial challenge for historians. To reconstruct and make sense of the past in ways that will engage varied audiences, historians constantly confront hard decisions of what to include. To the researcher, particularly one immersed in the archives, just about everything seems interesting and important enough to merit inclusion. And if the intended audience is a specialist one, then one would want to err on the side of including more rather than less. But this approach has obvious costs: narratives get bogged down and major themes risk getting lost in the flood of details.

Grow's book is impressively comprehensive and exhaustive. It can also be exhausting. It revels in the primary source material. Its narrative gives one the experience of sitting in an archive, of pouring through correspondences, news accounts, and trial transcripts. (Baseball on Trial includes sentences such as this: “Judge Landis officially convened the proceedings by asking each side's attorneys to identify themselves” [78].) Grow charts every twist and turn in the litigation history and every legal argument offered. The formula here is the familiar one of a nuts and bolts litigation history.

Banner, too, has done the hard work of immersing himself in the history and archives, but his approach is to then pull back, to separate the interesting but unnecessary from the essential, while still retaining those details that illuminate the larger picture. The Baseball Trust is like a carefully crafted lecture. Banner has a unique ability to write crystal-clear prose that explains what needs to be explained and delves to the core of the relevant issue, arriving at fair and interesting assessments along the way. In many ways this is a model of scholarly writing. In the field of sports law history—a field thinly populated by quality scholarship—this book is truly exceptional.

There is value in each of these approaches to writing legal history. For the reader interested in a comprehensive account of a seminal moment in baseball's legal history, Grow's Baseball on Trial is an excellent choice. For the reader looking for an insightful guide through baseball's legal history—and certainly for the reader whose interest is primarily history and law, as opposed to baseball—one will find no better book than Banner's Baseball Trust.