Christy Mathewson was one of the first baseball victims of total war. When America joined the Great War, the sport deployed its athletes to the cause, with hundreds of players donning the uniform and serving the country, albeit mere weeks before the armistice. Mathewson, at this point 38 and managing the Cincinnati Reds, was among them; after battling influenza during the sea voyage, he was assigned to the Chemical Warfare Service and tasked with instructing American recruits how to survive that horror of the infantry, mustard gas.

The “Use of Projectiles with the Sole Object to Spread Asphyxiating Poisonous Gases” was outlawed by the Hague Convention of 1899, one of the earliest organized attempts to limit the increasingly destructive effects of warfare. It was signed by all major parties, except (somewhat prophetically, given the fate of the League of Nations) the United States. The convention covered the gamut, providing guidelines on the war on citizens through naval blockades to the grisly possibility of bombs dropped by hot air balloons. A second convention was held in 1906 to update some of its tenets, including a strengthening of those balloon prohibitions. After the terrors of nationalism brought by Napoleon, and the bloodbaths of the American Civil War, these conventions were considered the only salvation of the growing threat of total war.

They failed. The Germans employed tear gas as early as 1914, in scarcely noticeable portions, and the French and English responded in turn. Soon, both sides were producing chlorine gas and employing it with impunity. British Lieutenant General Ferguson summarized the feelings of guiltlessness in what was officially a criminal act, by saying:

It is a cowardly form of warfare which does not commend itself to me or other English soldiers … We cannot win this war unless we kill or incapacitate more of our enemies than they do of us, and if this can only be done by our copying the enemy in his choice of weapons, we must not refuse to do so.”

In other words, once war had begun, all the rules were useless; it must be won at all costs.

It was into this miasma that the American soldiers were thrust, and Mathewson, too valuable for the front line, was one of the men tasked with teaching soldiers how to deal with it. As Philip Seib relates in his biography, The Player, his role was both useless and disastrous. The soldiers were trained in two-day courses on the use of detecting gas and using respirators, with drills that used real gas. The instructors, barking instructions to their young charges, were always the last to put on their masks. Mathewson performed countless numbers of these drills, including one botched exercise where the signal was never given and, according to Ty Cobb, some of the soldiers were killed. Mathewson told him: “I got a good dose of the stuff. I feel terrible.”

Mustard gas is a languorous thing. Mathewson toured France before returning to the States and attempting to rebuild his life. But his lungs were razed by influenza and gas, and tuberculosis occupied the void. He died at the age of 45.

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As long as there have been wars, there have been philosophers trying to stop them. Diplomats confronted the state of war directly, in their time; historians recorded the horrors of wars past, providing perspective. There have also been political philosophers, men like Cicero, Locke and Walzer, whose appeal is not that war is always evil, but that it is often unjust. Their developing idea was that some wars were more justified and more morally acceptable than others, and it was the duty of politicians and generals to steer toward a moral, just method of declaring and fighting each other. They divided the philosophy into two halves: jus ad bello, the morality of going to war, and jus in bello, the morality of conduct within war. The former concerns itself with when a country can bear arms against another, or intervene military during an internal conflict; the latter, about when you can shoot that nation’s civilians while sorting it out.

As long as there have been just war theorists, or perhaps before, there were also the men who scoffed at such talk. Realists, as we categorize them, believe that there is only one truth to war: that it is, as Sherman so succinctly put it, hell. Once the war starts, there are no rules, no manners. It’s kill or be killed, by any means necessary. Burn the villages, if it denies your enemy an advantage. Bomb the cities. Winning is the only thing that matters, and anyone who holds anything back is a coward or a fool.

The trouble with this gritty, cynical outlook is that if war really were an extension of politics by other means, we would constantly be sliding into it. (Insert your smirking about contemporary American foreign policy here.) Every skirmish would escalate; every political divide down to the scheduling of the neighborhood summer bake sale would come to blows. And yet history has proven that this isn’t the case; World War 3 never happened, and nations divide and combine peacefully sometimes, if not often enough. People throughout history have shown the capability, if not the habit, of fighting with conscience.

Baseball is an example of this self-regulation. The game has had its epidemics: umpire abuse in the early decades, gambling in the early 1900s, the rise of beanballs in the 1950s and 1960s. In each case, the danger that seemed to threaten the game found its own natural cure. Its players sought ways to moderate their behavior for the long-term interests of the game and their livelihood. Over time, passed down by word of mouth like classes of elementary school kids, baseball built a code of conduct bigger or at least as big as winning and losing. In youth leagues they call it sportsmanship; in the bigs, they get addressed by that nebulous concept called the “unwritten rules.”

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Like all sports, baseball is defined by its rules, and creates most of its attraction through them. Not its particular rules, which are often considered arcane or ridiculous, Rule 7.13 being this year’s favorite. It’s the fact that there are rules at all, that in our fractured culture we have an event where the results are relatively indisputable. We all witness the same wins and losses, bathe in the same Yoenis Cespedes throw, track the same Aroldis Chapman fastball. But without the material and arbitrary boundaries of baseball, these actions have little meaning or perspective.

A Hardball Times Update by Rachael McDaniel Goodbye for now.

Everyone loves Calvinball because no one has ever watched it being played. The first time would probably be enjoyable, might even ascend (if conducted capably) to an art form under the guise of improv. But it could hardly survive a 162-game season, in stadium or off-Broadway.

The march of baseball has been toward the increased specificity of rules, as technology and innovation have permitted. Where sports often fail is in their blurriness: when the results of a play can be contested by both sides (and their fans) as having happened differently. Relativism is a deadly threat to the reputation of any sport, and though all our advances have shaved it away, they never seem to disappear completely. The improvement of slow-motion replay created a minor controversy when we looked into the microscope and found, that like atomic weight, there was no such thing as a real catch, just a ball wobbling around in a leather glove. Baseball has surprisingly been fluid in its reconsideration of the rules, especially this year, in an attempt to maintain the validity of its rules with the players and the fans. In short, the rulebook of baseball has generally been a wild success.

It’s the restrictions that define baseball, as with all sports, and those who control the rules, the way the game must be played, control the game itself. Jus ad bello is left to the schedule makers, and does not need to be considered (except perhaps in a debate over the unbalanced schedule). But jus in bello is a source of eternal struggle: the battle over how battle is made. It’s difficult to regulate this aspect of conduct with rules alone.

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On August 14, 2001, while the Mariners were at the height of their baseball powers, the mild-mannered Jamie Moyer was pitted against the less mild-mannered Red Sox outfielder, Carl Everett. The two began sparring early, when Moyer complained to the umpire about Everett’s well-worn habit of wearing down the chalk of the batter’s box. Moyer tried to brush him back and instead plunked him with an 83 mile per hour fastball. In the fifth, Everett responded by hitting a home run off Moyer, and upon reaching the plate, he grabbed his crotch and spit toward the mound. It was not a shining moment for the game.

The rulebook contains nothing about the handling of one’s genitalia on the field of play, nor the flipping of bats or the vast majority of conduct that goes into a baseball player. Still, most people would recognize that copious lewd gestures and unprintable language might damage its station as the National Pastime. The rules mention sportsmanship four times; three of them relate to dangerous collisions or contact (a runner interfering with a fielder making a play, sliding out of the baseline to cleat an infielder, and a pitcher intentionally throwing at a batter). The final, an umbrella for all the rest, gives the umpire carte blanche to eject anyone for conduct deemed detrimental toward the game. Instead, they generally employ it to eject anyone for conduct deemed detrimental toward umpires.

Baseball has various methods for modifying behavior. The commissioner dictates this with fines, as he did with Carl Everett. The umpires control it with their power of ejection. Teams and their managers exude philosophies and train their employees to a certain type of behavior. And the players have their own laws that dictate conduct, enforced by their own system of judgment and sentencing.

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One of the interesting aspects of the unwritten rules is how often they get written about. Multiple books have been devoted to the subject, not to speak of hundreds of newspaper and internet articles. The lore of this code of ethics, and its M.C. Escher-like foundations, fascinates the baseball fan.

One common refrain heard is that the unwritten rules should just be, you know, written. Make them clear to everyone. (Who would do this is left to the imagination; I enjoy the image of a congress of athletes selecting their own Thomas Jefferson and handing him a quill. Brandon McCarthy, perhaps?) But they never will be written down, because transcribing anything contains its power. When Dallas Braden invoked the unwritten rules to castigate Alex Rodriguez for jogging across the mound, many other players noted that they’d never heard of this rule before. They hadn’t, because it didn’t exist; Braden was creating it on the spot. It’s because the rules are so cloudy and amorphous that he was able to cite them, as if in a forgotten paragraph, like the commerce clause.

Many of the rules are arcane and unnecessary, and often generally harmless. A whole subset belongs to the category of inspiring a sense of teamwork in what is, compared to other team sports, a series of largely individual achievements. (“Everybody joins a fight” is my favorite maxim; while most people witnessing a fight look for action, my instinct is to hunt for the half-hearted bear-holds in the periphery.) The silliest often pertain to a man or a team’s sense of honor, such as earlier this season when Bo Porter felt disgraced by the Athletics bunting against the shift.

We read about this outdated sense of honor and generally, we laugh. The democratic process of evolving the unwritten rules generally involves sniping and complaining through the media, a difficult task to carry out with nobility. The younger generation in particular delights at the spontaneous joy of the bat flip and the pride of the slow home run trot, and grow infuriated when the grizzled old manager arranges a brushback in the next plate appearance. But there’s a purposeful, if nebulous and often wrongheaded, reason for all this posturing: a battle for control over how baseball presents itself. If rules shape baseball, the unwritten rules are the attempt by the players to fight for their game as their own.

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The general comparison of sports to warfare is a tiresome and troublesome thing, a blurry romanticism of false ideals, and this article will do nothing to help this. But the conduct of warfare, its rules, have been presented as a parallel to athletics since Homer threw that chariot race in at the end of the Iliad. Both require competition, duress, a victor and a loser; only one seems to allow, and even occasionally expect, fair play.

One reason for this, and a reason why the rules of war were seemingly easier to follow in centuries past, is the development of power. The idea of “all costs” warfare didn’t exist because war didn’t require all costs; rarely was the sovereignty of a nation threatened. When Alexander threw his flags over the known world, they were pulled down almost immediately, because the logistics of actively destroying and replacing the sovereignty of a people was impossible. (It still isn’t easy today.) Nations were conquered often enough, but they generally continued on as old, with perhaps a stiffer tax rate and some forced parade attendance.

Napoleon, Hitler, and nuclear weaponry changed all this, allowing nations and people to each be obliterated permanently through warfare. Unless relegation catches on, baseball is immune to this threat. One could argue that a truly terrible performance can eventually salt the earth and lead to their forced relocation, as was the case for the Spiders and Pilots. But without that specter of dissolution, baseball players are never forced to the brink; at worst they’re thrown into the reparations of rebuilding. At the end of a bad loss, the victims pick themselves up off the (battle)field and get ready to fight again.

In a sense, the best parallel for the modern athlete is the ancient mercenary. At first glance that looks like an ugly comparison, given the modern private armies and their lawless, often immoral corporate soldiers of fortune. But in the days before nationalism, basically all soldiers were paid professionals, whether they were land-owning knights with their personal retinues fighting for their benefactor, or Swiss pikemen putting themselves on the open market. The key is that our soldier-athletes are consenting to their participation, and are free to make or cease making war on their own terms, based on their contracts.

These mercenaries, like baseball players, had incentive to see their team win; with victory came greater glory and, of course, greater spoils. But they also had their own interests at stake, and so they developed warrior or honor codes to conduct and protect themselves. Much like the unwritten rules, these focus on the importance of camaraderie and respect, courage and loyalty. So much of the code revolves around eliminating the freeloading aspect of the collective action problem that comes with any example of teamwork: essentially, making sure that the guy next to you is doing his or her job so that you can be free to worry about your own. In baseball, it’s about sticking up for your own guy, which leads to those bench-clearing brawls with 100% turnout, and the obvious retaliations that are as much about being obvious as they are about being retaliations.

But a more subtle aspect of the warrior code relates to one’s enemies, rather than one’s colleagues. “Treat the enemy with respect” is a tenet which, in some form or another, shows up in many of these doctrines. This is more than just an effort to instill a sense of honor in the troops. It’s designed with the knowledge that the guys on the other line are pretty much identical, except for the color of their laundry. And if you do something backhanded, or if you go a little too cutthroat…well, they’re likely to do it back to you next time. Mercenary codes ensured that a defeated army, their political value destroyed, were allowed to flee the battlefield, since they were about to become free agents anyway after the war.

In baseball, the nation-state owners have always insisted on preventing camaraderie between opposing players, partially for the business of creating a sense of competition on the field, and partially for a sense of preventing it with the union off the field. A hundred years ago, this distrust of collusion was a wise counterattack against potential fixes, but Curt Flood and Marvin Miller largely lifted this economic incentive off the players, with Pete Rose being the one notable exception.

Baseball’s warrior code is far from perfect, or even good. As with soldiers, it’s often used as a form of coercion by one group of players against another, typically veterans against rookies, in direct contrast their theoretical spirit of cohesion and camaraderie. Nowhere is this more true than with the beanball, baseball’s version of mutually assured destruction, and the treatment that is often given to players who refuse to endanger the health of others. Once the unwritten rules cross over into intentional physical harm, we tread beyond the boundary of sport into something real and disturbing. As Dirk Hayhurst writes:

This kind of thinking illustrates a point you see again and again int he unwritten code – that baseball, and the way you behave while playing it, is more important than the laws we ask society to abide by. How else can you rationalize breaking someone’s wrist, hand, or skull with a beanball as an acceptable form of punishment?

The unwritten rules cannot exist alone, or even supreme; if they did, baseball would burn itself out in its pride. It is a check against limitless warfare, but it must be balanced against in turn.

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We want to think of the baseball game in its simplest form, the one we first approached as children: one in which the guys in the red shirts are fighting the ones in blue. But each baseball player is in conflict with various sources at all times: with the opponent, with his bargain-seeking owner, trying to leverage his usage with an eye toward arbitration; to the manager who knows he’ll be gone next year, wringing the value out of his arm or knees; to the twenty-two year old who plays the same position and whose grounders always seem to find their way into the hole. It’s a happy coincidence for baseball that during the game itself, most of these forms of interest focus on the singular task of scoring runs. But the way in which they’re scored, and the sacrifices they require, demand different costs at different times.

Bunting with a five-run lead seems like a harmless, trivial thing. But expending maximum effort at all times, winning for the team at all costs, grows into a greater demand each of a 162 times a year. Cleating a second baseman in June, with its necessary repercussions, becomes the type of warfare that Carl von Clausewitz, history’s favorite realist, envisioned: a series of endless revenges and preemptive injuries. Currently our society treats sports as though there is a code of conduct that applies to youth sports and another to professional, and the latter is bleeding into the former. If winning becomes the only thing, the only possible outcome is inexorable escalation, of harder play and higher spikes, ignored concussions and broken bones, a return to John McGraw baseball.

It isn’t good for the players, and it isn’t good for the game. At no time has it been more clear that a sport of violence and aggression, of militarism and hate, is not the direction baseball should follow. Total war must, at all costs, be avoided. There is a middle ground between lawlessness and fascism, of an activity without winning and an activity where there is nothing except winning. The unwritten rules, imperfect and wrongheaded as they often are, seek a third outcome: of an honor in the fighting. It’s not sportsmanship in itself, but there’s something noble in its moderation.

References & Resources