The Regulatory Space of Baseball: Is Global Regulation Needed to Govern the International Movement of Players?

Occupying baseball’s regulatory space are multiple regimes that govern global labour mobility and the international transfer of amateur and professional players. Professional leagues are the key regulatory actors in this space, non-state actors responsible for establishing the controls on a player’s labour mobility within the league and to foreign competitions. The dominant regulator in baseball is Major League Baseball (‘MLB’) that acts as a de facto international sports federation and custodian of baseball. This article uses regulatory space theory to explore how globalisation forced the increased interaction between professional baseball leagues around the world. Despite the subsequent accelerated evolution of the rules and processes governing the international movement of professional baseballers, the global regime primarily consists of bilateral player agreements involving either MLB or Nippon Professional Baseball (‘NPB’) and other professional leagues in Latin America and Asia. This article will analyse how this system of regulation created numerous problems in the recruitment and movement of amateur and professional players, most notably an exploitative labour system in Latin America that potentially violates various international human rights laws and led to the human trafficking of Cuban baseball players. In response to these regulatory failures the authors propose a number of urgent reforms to ensure the global regulation of labour mobility in baseball facilitates the movement of players in line with international human rights through a global player transfer system that includes independent dispute resolution and that is operated by an independent global regulator.