The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

136 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
Major League Baseball has enjoyed an exemption from the historic
Sherman Antitrust Act since 1922 when the U.S. Supreme Court held
that “the national pastime” is a monopoly meriting special protection.
Recognizing he’d never get to first base by challenging the federal exemption,
Dwyer’s strategy was to sue the American League in a state court,
seeking $32 million in damages resulting from the loss of the Pilots. The
Kingdome was finally under construction but the taxpayers had lost their
prime tenant. Skeptics observed that even if the state prevailed the verdict
would be monetary. What Seattle wanted was a replacement team.
“Dwyer’s idea was to get the case in front of a jury, then put on the witness
stand some of the club owners who approved the move of the Pilots,”
Art Thiel recounts in Out of Left Field, a lively history of the Mariners.
“Gorton felt Dwyer’s strategy had a shot. He figured the jury would find
the owners as loathsome as he did.” Gorton had concluded “that if an
American League owner moved into your neighborhood, he would lower
property values.” 5
“Since Washington had recently passed its own antitrust statute, our
state courts were not obliged to follow federal precedent,” says Jerry Mc-
Naul, a Seattle attorney who was Dwyer’s co-counsel. “That made it imperative
that we get the case into our state court system and prevent it
from being removed to federal court. The way we did that was by adding
the concessionaire for the Pilots, Sports Service, as a defendant. It also
gave us an additional argument that even if there was an exemption, it was
lost when the league conspired with a non-exempt party—Sports Service.
We sued for fraud, breach of contract and violation of Washington’s new
antitrust statute. That strategy worked. Not only did it accomplish our
objectives, but we also ultimately settled with Sports Service for an
amount that pretty much financed the state’s litigation costs in the case.” 6
The owners bobbed, blustered and bunted, using every angle to try
and get the case moved to a federal court. Dwyer, Gorton and Spellman
persisted, attending several Major League winter meetings to ask for a
new team. “We were given five minutes, maybe, after we’d waited around
for two or three days—just treated contemptuously,” Gorton recalls.
There was talk that the Giants might move north from San Francisco. It
was all lip service, Gorton says. Delaying tactics. The plaintiffs refused to
fold. They had nothing to lose.
In January of 1976, after six years of wrangling, the trial in State of
Washington, et al. v. The American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, et
al. got under way in Snohomish County, north of Seattle. The trial came