CHARTER

Mission

Build and maintain a verifiable, citable archive of the documents that have governed Major League Baseball and its associated entities — past and present — to academic research-grade accuracy. The archive's job is to give any future research question a reliable foundation: a place where the actual text of a CBA, a court ruling, a Congressional hearing, a stadium agreement, or a commissioner's memo can be read in full, traced to its source, and cited with confidence.

Why this exists

The existing public collections of baseball governance documents are partial and decaying:

• The SABR Business of Baseball Files is well-curated but limited in scope and not consistently updated.
• The businessofbaseball.com documents library is excellent historically but the site itself has gone dark; we are working off Wayback Machine captures.
• The Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment Law Blog has strong recent and current coverage but is not designed as an archive.
• MLB and the MLBPA do not publish a comprehensive document repository, and they are not obligated to.
• Court documents are scattered across PACER, Justia, Cornell LII, FindLaw, and individual court websites.
• Congressional materials are scattered across congress.gov, GPO, and committee sites.

The result is that anyone trying to seriously understand the structure of the sport — labor, finance, antitrust, ownership, governance — has to reconstruct the documentary record from scratch, every time. This archive is the consolidation.

Scope — in

The archive collects documents that govern, constitute, or materially shape the business and labor structure of Major League Baseball and its associated entities. Specifically:

• The leagues and their governance — MLB's Constitution and prior versions, the Major League Agreement (1921 and revisions), the National Agreement (multiple eras), the historical AL and NL constitutions, MLB Rules.
• Collective bargaining and labor agreements — every MLB CBA (formally "Basic Agreement") that has ever been ratified, the MiLB CBA, the Major League Umpires Association CBA, the Joint Drug Agreement and Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program, the Uniform Player Contract and its historical forms.
• MLBPA governance — bylaws, agent regulations, pension plan documents, agent certification rules.
• Antitrust law and litigation — Federal Baseball Club v. National League (1922), Toolson, Flood v. Kuhn, Curt Flood Act of 1998, Sherman Act as applied, Piazza, Cardtoons, City of San Jose v. MLB, and other rulings that have shaped or tested baseball's antitrust exemption.
• Federal legislation that materially affects baseball — Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, Curt Flood Act, Sports Bribery Act, relevant tax code provisions affecting franchise ownership, Sarbanes-Oxley as applied to publicly traded ownership entities.
• Congressional hearings — Celler hearings (1951, 1957–58), Senate Commerce hearings on steroids (2005), House Government Reform hearings on steroids (2005), contraction hearings (2001), and other formal hearings where league or union representatives have testified.
• Reports and investigations — Mitchell Report (2007), Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics (2000), MMAC financial reviews, internal investigation reports made public.
• Franchise transactions and finance — sale agreements and approval documents where public, RICO and similar litigation by minority owners, financial reviews and audits made public, valuation-related litigation.
• Stadium and relocation documents — lease agreements, no-relocation agreements, public financing documents, eminent domain rulings, EIS documents where applicable.
• Commissioner decisions and memos — drug policy memos (Vincent, Selig, Manfred), suspensions and decisions, formal orders, statements of policy.
• Arbitration and grievance rulings — Messersmith/McNally (1975), Garvey, Andy Messersmith, salary arbitration precedents where public.
• Broadcasting, media rights, and intellectual property — TV rights deals where public, MLBAM-related litigation (C.B.C. v. MLBAM), licensing rulings, RSN-related filings.
• International posting and player movement — MLB-NPB posting agreements, MLB-KBO agreements, related litigation.
• Drug, conduct, and discipline policies — JDA, JDPTP, domestic violence policy, joint domestic violence policy, gambling policy, social media policy where formalized.
• Adjacent player and labor entities — Major League Umpires Association documents, Professional Baseball Agreement (MLB-MiLB historical agreements), Players Trust documents where governance-relevant.
• Pre-modern foundational documents — 1876 NL Constitution, 1882 Allegheny Base-Ball Club v. Bennett, 1903 AL-NL Agreement, 1905 World Series Rules, the early reserve clause documents.

Scope — out

To keep the project tractable, the following are deliberately excluded:

• Foreign league internal documents — NPB, KBO, CPBL, Cuban League, Mexican League internal governance. The MLB-side of posting and international agreements is in scope; the foreign-league-side is not. (Exception: if a foreign league's labor or governance document is a direct counterparty or reference point in an MLB document, include it as a related-document.)
• Independent leagues and Negro Leagues — outside the scope of "MLB and associated entities." These deserve their own archive.
• Routine on-field rule changes — the Official Baseball Rules edition history is in scope; individual rule-change memos and pace-of-play tweaks generally are not, unless they were the subject of CBA negotiation or formal commissioner action.
• Player transaction logs — individual trades, signings, and contracts (unless a contract is itself a landmark, e.g., the original Curt Flood letter, Catfish Hunter's contract, or a contract that became evidence in litigation).
• Sports media commentary and analysis — even excellent analytical work (FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, Defector) is not in scope. Source material only.
• Player biographies and stats — out. Baseball-Reference and the Hall of Fame Library cover this.
• Fantasy and rotisserie material — out.
• NCAA baseball and amateur draft eligibility rules — out, except where they intersect with MLB rules (the draft itself, posting of amateur players, etc.).

Guiding principles

1. Primary sources over secondary — always trace lineage to the original publisher.
2. Two-source confirmation before "verified" — independence matters; co-derived sources don't count.
3. Honest uncertainty — placeholder, needs_review, unknown, and WANTLIST exist so we never have to guess.
4. Citable structure — every field that could be cited (date, title, parties, citation, source) follows a consistent schema.
5. Resilience to link rot — local copies + archive.org snapshots + SHA256 hashes.
6. No editorial framing in the archive itself — the documents speak for themselves; analysis belongs in whatever downstream work the archive serves.
7. Transparent provenance — every retrieval, every verification, every status promotion is logged.
8. Future-proofing — the archive is built to outlast any individual session, plan, or tool. Schema and conventions are explicit so anyone (or any AI) picking it up later can continue without losing fidelity.

What success looks like

In version one, the archive contains the full "core canon" defined in RESEARCH_PLAN.md (every MLB CBA, the current and major historical Constitutions, the landmark antitrust cases, the major federal legislation, the major reports) with verified status and complete metadata.

In version two, the archive expands to cover the full historical and recent supplementary documents listed in RESEARCH_PLAN.md's later phases.

In ongoing maintenance, every new governance document — a new CBA, a new commissioner memo, a new ruling — is added within a reasonable window of issuance, with the same standards applied.

The archive becomes the thing you would point any serious researcher, journalist, or curious labor nerd to when they ask "where can I read the actual document."