People Don't Know as Much as They Think They Do
A baseball rule discussion leads to a broader truth
Despite having gone to games all my life and having even done paid work as a scorekeeper when I was young, I don’t know very much about the rules of baseball. If you gave me a quiz, I’d probably get 50 percent right or something. If you showed me 10 videos of different pitching and pick-off motions and asked me to pick out the balks, I’d be lost. And obviously, nothing in my career as a lawyer or my educational background gives me any expertise at all on the subject.
But this week, there was a blow-up over an obscure baseball rule that I actually knew. I don’t even know WHY I knew the rule; maybe Vin Scully or another radio broadcaster discussed it on a broadcast back when I listened to a lot of games, or maybe my Peewee League coach taught it to me. Nonetheless, I did know it.
The rule concerns overrunning first base. A baserunner who does not stop on second or third base, or who leaves it before time is called by the umpire, can be tagged and called out. However, the batter running to first base is treated differently- he may overrun first base and, as long as he touched the bag before overrunning it, he can’t be tagged out.
However, there is an exception to this rule, which is that if the batter makes an attempt to run to second, then he’s back to being a live baserunner again and he can be tagged out, even if he thereafter tries to return to first.
That’s the rule. You can look it up- it’s Major League Baseball Rule 5.09(b)(11).
But that is not what a lot of people- including experienced sportswriters and baseball insiders and even some umpires (including, indeed, someone I know who has something like 40 years of experience as a baseball umpire), believe the rule says. Rather, they believe the rule prohibits any move towards second base.
To get slightly deeper into the weeds, a “move” and an “attempt” are different things. If a person reaches for her holstered gun but then pulls back, she has is not guilty of attempted murder, but she did make a move for her gun. An “attempt” is forming the intent to do something and then taking a substantial step towards it.
And this brings us to Christian Yelich, the star right fielder of the Milwaukee Brewers. He was called out on this play, and then ejected from the game when he argued it with the umpire:
Yelich made a move, a feint, a fake. But he never attempted to actually run towards second base. He did not form the intention to do it and take a substantial step towards second base. Under the text of the MLB rule, this is an easy call, and the umpire blew it. (And then blew it again by ejecting a star player from the game (which could have resulted in a Brewers loss!), rather than reversing the call.)
But, many people then took to Twitter to defend the call. And almost all of them repeated the same mantra- he made a slight move towards second base. They had all learned that this was the rule, when it wasn’t. Since online, nobody ever admits to being wrong, when it was pointed out that it wasn’t the rule, what resulted was some combination of “well, that’s how umpires are taught, so it basically is the rule” and/or “even the slightest twitch is ‘attempting’ to go to second”. The second position is ridiculous, of course, as you can see from my attempted murder hypothetical.
And the former is also ridiculous. Of course, there might be an unwritten rule that any twitch is an attempt. But if that is correct, first of all, you need to show your work, i.e., is there any sort of written instruction to umpires or instructional video from MLB or even a series of examples on video where umpires have always made this call? And second, the unwritten rule would still be at variance with the written rule. I.e., maybe by common consent and practice, Yelich might be out, but that still puts his argument in a different perspective- he’s basically asking the umpire to enforce the written rule. Why on earth would you eject a star player and potentially change the result of a game because he correctly points out the written rule that the umpire didn’t follow?
As you might imagine, though, I didn’t write all this to make a point about baseball rules. Rather, this is a point about expertise. All of us know less than we think we do. Even experts (this is the reason even some experts got the Yelich call wrong), but especially people who casually follow something. There’s a Twitter feed called Bad Legal Takes which everyone should follow, in which all sorts of Twitter users, including prominent people, get called out for making definitive, completely wrong statements about the law. Indeed, every lawyer has run into these- people who don’t understand most of the Constitution does not bind private actors; people who think “hate speech” is unprotected under the First Amendment; people who think vice cops can’t arrest someone when they initiate the suggestion of having sex for money, etc.
But I am sure that lawyers are guilty of Bad Physics Takes, physicists are guilty of Bad Psychology Takes, psychologists are guilty of Bad Economics Takes, and economists are guilty of Bad Political Takes. What happens is that we hear something or learn something and just assume we have expertise. Or sometimes we actually do learn something, but we learn it wrong or learn it in shorthand (which is what happened with the baseball experts interpreting the “overrun the base” rule), or we learn something is a “rule” that isn’t a rule at all (the product of all sorts of definitive, incorrect, prescriptive takes about “rules” in the English language).
There isn’t a real solution to this except to be more humble. Outside of your areas of expertise, you probably don’t know as much as you think you do. And even inside your areas of legitimate expertise, it helps to refresh your recollection before rushing to Twitter, whether it’s a lawyer who goes back and reads a couple of cases or a baseball expert who checks the rule book.