the Astros had ended in 2020, but prevailed on tortious interference. Conversely, the Staten Island Yankees lost their tortious interference claims while the court found the parent Yankees, from whom Nostalgic had bought the team, had represented at the time of sale that they would never de-affiliate regardless of the status of the contract. Both teams called the results a success and indicated they would proceed with discovery. The parent Yankees noted how many of the Staten Island Yankees' claims had been dismissed and anticipated that the remaining ones would fall on appeal. In December, both teams, joined by the similarly de-affiliated Norwich Sea Unicorns and Salem-Keizer Volcanoes, filed a federal antitrust suit in the Southern District against MLB. The plaintiffs pointed to the skeptical passage in Alston and said "[we] thus have objectively good reasons to believe that the Supreme Court would no longer apply the 'unrealistic' and 'inconsistent' and 'aberration[al]' baseball antitrust exemption if presented with a proper case for reconsidering it ... This is that case." One of the lawyers involved told a sports podcast that since it seemed that the Court had been inviting a challenge in Alston, "[w]e've decided we're going to accept that invitation." Sam Ehrlich, a Boise State legal studies professor whose writings about the baseball antitrust exemption include an amicus brief in Alston, told The Washington Post that claim was more than just talk. "Everything in the complaint is compelling. Everything they said is a clear antitrust violation. Baseball, the way it's been operating in the minor leagues, is a clear violation of antitrust law except that it has this exemption." In a University of Cincinnati Law Review article, Ehrlich was more equivocal. He called the case "arguably the most compelling threat to the baseball exemption in nearly two decades", and suggested two paths to victory once the case reached the Supreme Court, as it likely would have to. One was for the Court to accept Piazza and Butterworths reading of Flood that limited it to the reserve clause and that the CFA thus merely left the existing exemption intact without clarifying it or defining it in any way. The other way was to follow the "changing market realities" line of thinking that had led to Alston from its predecessor, NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, and hold similarly that the changes in baseball since Flood justified setting