Major League Baseball (MLB) recently announced some changes to the Rules of Baseball. Setting aside for the moment the particular details of the changes, or the wisdom of making them, I’d like to take this opportunity to remind people of how the process they went through is a valuable demonstration of how separation of powers should work in government.
What’s most important about that process is what didn’t happen. They didn’t have individual umpires making changes to the rules on the fly, and then expecting all the other umpires to engage in the baseball equivalent of stare decisis — that is, the idea that it would be more important for umpires to agree with each other, than for them to agree with the rules as written.
As Justice Brandeis said in defense of stare decisis: ‘It is more important that the applicable rule of law be settled than that it be settled right.’
Yes, he really said that.
In baseball, if it turns out that the rules are leading to unfortunate consequences (games taking too long, not enough bases being stolen, too many ankles being stepped on, athleticism being suppressed), then those problems are noted, and at the next available opportunity, they are addressed by the ‘branch’ of baseball whose job it is to make the rules.
In a case where something unanticipated happens — for example, a ball struck with a bat splits perfectly in half, with one half being caught by a player, and the other half falling to the ground — it is necessary for the umpire to be able to make a decision in order to allow the game to continue. But his decision doesn’t apply to any other games. It’s left for the rules committee to figure out how to handle such events in the future.
This is how separation of powers is supposed to work. The rules committee makes the rules, and the umpires make sure those rules are followed.
Imagine what kind of uproar we would see if umpires began usurping the process of updating the rules of baseball in the same way that our courts have usurped the processes of updating statutes, regulations, and constitutions — something that has been going on, largely without comment, since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, in which the courts asserted that it is their job ‘to say what the law is.’
If you’re looking for a good, one-sentence explanation for how things have gone so far off the rails in this country, it might be: We take our sports more seriously than we take our courts.