Why Are Unwritten Rules Disputed and Written Rules Ignored?

KAFFEE: Corporal, would you turn to the page in this book that says where the mess hall is, please?
BARNES: Well, Lt. Kaffee, that’s not in the book, sir.
KAFFEE: You mean to say in all your time at Gitmo you’ve never had a meal?
BARNES: No, sir. Three squares a day, sir.
KAFFEE: I don’t understand. How did you know where the mess hall was, if it’s not in this book?
BARNES: Well, I guess I just followed the crowd at chow time, sir.
KAFFEE: No more questions.
— A Few Good Men

A BALL is a pitch which does not enter the strike zone in flight and is not struck at by the batter. If the pitch touches the ground and bounces through the strike zone it is a “ball.”
— Major League Baseball 2015 Official Rules

Baseball has an extraordinarily extensive rulebook — the latest version runs to 172 pages, and Major League Baseball helpfully appended the entire 2014 rulebook to the 2015 PDF, so it comprises 282 pages in all. But it still remains relatively laconic, when you think about all of the things that aren’t there. That makes sense, to some degree: the Government Printing Office’s PDF of the American Constitution is a mere 85 pages. And that’s the governing document for a country of 300 million people, not just a league of 30 teams.

Of course, there are rules, and there are rules. Or, more to the point: the rules aren’t necessarily the rules. (Wrestling isn’t wrestling, either.)

That’s the point that baseball historian John Thorn made to me in an interview about the New York Knickerbockers, who in 1845 compiled baseball’s first surviving rulebook. You can read it today, a svelte list with a mere 20 rules that somehow, improbably, describes a game relatively similar to the one that we pay to watch men play 170 years later.

Among the rules that have survived more or less unchanged from then to now are:

10TH. A ball knocked out of the field, or outside the range of the first and third base, is foul.

11TH. Three balls being struck at and missed and the last one caught, is a hand-out; if not caught is considered fair, and the striker bound to run.

Brevity was sufficient, Thorn told me, because of course the Knickerbockers already knew how to play their game. “Custom and practice ruled, as it did with any innovation,” said Thorn. “The idea that you would make a rulebook and allow the rulebook to rule would make no sense!”

As you know, any time you ever learn a game for the first time, the most important things to know about how it is played can’t be learned from the rulebook: they can be learned only by playing. Very often, the rules that you and your friends play by will incorporate numerous commonly agreed-upon interpretations and departures from the written letter of the law.

For example: Nothing is supposed to happen when you land on free parking in Monopoly. You certainly aren’t supposed to get $500 just for landing there. It makes the game take a lot longer to play. Parker Brothers doesn’t even know when people started playing the game that way. And yet that is the way that most of us grow up learning how to play the game.

As it turns out, refereed games work the same way.

We can create a two-by-two matrix describing the possibilities: rules can be written or unwritten, and they can either be uniformly agreed to or there can be widespread disagreement.

Written, enforced	Written, unevenly enforced
Unwritten, but consensus	Unwritten, and disputed

The distinction is important. A rule where everyone agrees on the interpretation is much easier to adjudicate mechanically — by replay or robots — than a rule that at its heart boils down to a judgment call. Even if we all agreed on the definition of the zone, would we agree that it should be illegal for Russell Martin to fool an umpire into calling a ball a strike?

• Written and enforced as written. This comprises all of the basic, definitional stuff. Three strikes and you’re out; hit a ball out of the park and you get to touch them all.
• Written, but unevenly enforced. This applies to all the rules where there are widely understood exceptions. The neighborhood rule (allowing a middle infielder turning a double play to be in the “neighborhood” of the base without actually stepping on the bag, to keep safer from takeout slides) was unwritten for a long time, as was the notion that anything above the belt was a ball. It also applies to the coaches’ boxes, whose pristine chalk lines are hardly ever crossed by the cleats of the coaches who frequently stand a yard up the line.
• Unwritten, but uniformly agreed upon. Many of these are ethical in nature. If a guy hits a foul ball off his foot, the umpire will frequently and theatrically wipe the plate off to delay the game so the pain will subside. If a runner tries to slap the ball out of a fielder’s glove when running to first, like Robert Fick in 2003 or Alex Rodriguez in 2004, he will be uniformly condemned. (This rule may be only partially unwritten; umpires determined that Rodriguez had committed interference based on a rule in the MLB Umpire Manual. This definition of interference is not contained in the MLB rulebook.)
• Unwritten, and hotly disputed. These are often honor-based. The definition of what constitutes disrespect is frequently and loudly litigated on the field. Pimping a home run, flipping a bat and jawing at the other players are condemned by some but seen as unproblematic by others. Same for the most frequent punishments for these supposed crimes: rushing the mound and throwing at a guy’s head.

Some rules are violated frequently enough that the umpire’s decision to call them is almost purely a judgment call, like balks, or holding in football, or traveling in basketball, or flopping in soccer. They are most likely to be called when they are violated most egregiously, but most of the time, most players know you can get away with it, which is why players do it so often. (Obviously, in baseball, you can’t balk with the bases empty, but there are plenty of pitchers whose motion looks like very definition of a balk. No, I’m not only talking about Carter Capps.)

And there are some rules which exist in the rulebook but which have hardly ever been called in living memory, like Rule 8.04, the 12-second rule, which required pitchers to deliver the ball within 12 seconds after he received the ball. (Steve Trachsel, for one, played his entire career blissfully ignorant of this unenforced rule.) This rule was so widely ignored that many fans had no idea it existed when Major League Baseball undertook its pace-of-game reforms last year.

Similarly rarely enforced is rule 6.08b, which says that a batter is not entitled to first base on a hit by pitch if “the batter makes no attempt to avoid being touched by the ball.” Other than the famous call that preserved Don Drysdale’s scoreless innings streak, batters are almost never denied first base after being plunked by a ball they made no attempt to avoid.

Consequently, the unwritten interpretation of the rule is, if anything, more important than the rule itself. Baseball being baseball, rules that are purely unwritten seem to be just as important — or, at least, they are just as important to the people who agree that they exist at all. I used to love writing about them over at Fangraphs.

Yet the tortured logic of them can truly make your head hurt. I wrote about a situation in which former Chicago Cubs manager Mike Quade got incensed when Carlos Gomez stole two bases in the ninth inning of a game that Ron Roenicke’s Brewers were winning 5-0, as he said:

Everybody has to make their own decision on that. There are unwritten rules, so I’d disagree with [Roenicke] on that. Since they’re unwritten, I guess the decision on what they are and when they apply are left to the individual.
…
A lot of situations, a lot of different things apply. I cut (Tyler) Colvin loose with a five- or six-run lead last year in the middle of a game with the bases loaded and 3-0 count, and had an umpire tell my young player that was not right, which was amazing. These unwritten rules — everybody has their own interpretation. Sometimes when interpretations differ, that’s when you run into trouble.

Because unwritten rules are unwritten, there are always two things going on in any player’s mind: his own interpretation of those rules, and the other players’ interpretation of them. Baseball’s unwritten rules have a long tradition of being enforced on the field, which means that if a player runs afoul of someone else’s interpretation, he is liable to get spiked or thrown at. That was a nuance that came out when I emailed Delino DeShields Sr., a major base stealer in his own day, to ask him what he thought of the Quade-Gomez argument. I put his response in the same blog post.

“I am not a big fan of the so called unwritten rules,” he told me. “Yes, you do need to respect the game, but a five run lead is not a completely safe lead. I would not have taken the base in that situation, but as far as strategy, I don’t have a problem with it.” When I asked to clarify why he wouldn’t have taken the base, his team’s director of media relations responded: “He said he would not do it due to the likelihood of someone getting hit.”

Obviously, the biggest difference between written and unwritten rules is that written rules are enforced by umpires (when they are at enforced at all), while unwritten rules are enforced by players. But the bigger distinction is between the rich game that we all know as baseball, and the inanimate husk depicted by the rulebook. No set of rules can ever truly describe a game, no more than a play can be described by its stage directions. The essence of the game is in its playing.

Of course, as baseball expands video review and eventually, inevitably, moves toward a system where certain calls like balls and strikes and safe/out can be automated, it may seem that we are moving toward a game where the rulebook rules. It is tempting to fall for the illusion that, at least in sports, there is such a thing as objective truth.

But there’s no such thing. “A lot of situations, a lot of different things apply,” as Mike Quade said. “Sometimes when interpretations differ, that’s when you run into trouble.”