Major League Baseball under investigation: how the industry used public relations to promote its past to save its present.

This study used Berger's (1999) four characteristics of organizational public relations to examine how Major League Baseball (MLB) responded to the 1951-1952 congressional investigation into the sport's business dealings. This analysis demonstrated the impact an entity's image, which is based in large part on past communications and prior behavior, has on its current situation. in this case, MLB's image as a sport outweighed any effort by legislators to present professional baseball as a monopoly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]