Bad Rules Get Broken
There’s this annoying thing that baseball fans have had to get used to over the last few years. Usually it comes up on stolen base attempts, but it can be any tag play at second or third base. What happens is that a runner will narrowly beat the throw and just get to the base before the tag is applied. But then, upon a replay review, it will turn out that the runner momentarily lost contact with the base while the tag was still applied. It’s something no umpire would call because it’s only visible when you can pause a replay frame by frame, but by rule the runner is now out.
This rule is so stupid, people keep writing about how stupid it is, and even the MLB has acknowledged that it’s pretty stupid. But the rule persists. Base runners are now being taught new slides that limit the possibility of accidentally coming off the bag, but the problem is not how players are sliding—it’s the rule itself. If you make a rule that is impossible to follow, you have a bad rule.
I was thinking about this recently when reading Alex Speier’s great story in the Boston Globe about the Covid outbreak on the Red Sox last month. The article is a great look at the precautions teams are taking in general, and the specifics of Boston’s outbreak—definitely worth reading—but one detail stands out: The day before Kiké Hernández became the first player to test positive, he took a flight with the rest of his teammates, despite experiencing symptoms. This would seem like a clear violation of Covid protocols, except that Hernández did not recognize them as symptoms. He felt aches, fatigue, and dehydration… not exactly unusual things for a baseball player to experience during the last week in August. He simply assumed it was normal wear and tear from a long season.
The phrase “if you are experiencing symptoms” has been bandied about for 20 months now, attached to rules and guidelines since the pandemic first started. In many ways, the best thing you can do to protect others, besides get the vaccine, is to stay home if you are experiencing symptoms. The problem is that the list of Covid symptoms is long; more importantly, it includes things as banal as “headache” or “fatigue.” And so the “if you are experiencing symptoms” advice becomes much less effective. Even if you have a headache, you probably don’t have Covid.
And yet some of the restrictions we tack on to “if you are experiencing symptoms” are pretty extreme. Perhaps you’ve been asked to fill out a form recently, to get into a gym or an office or board a flight or something, and seen some version of the question, “Have you experienced any symptoms of Covid-19 for the last 14 days?” Perhaps you start to wonder, “Have I had a headache at some point in the last two weeks? Did I feel fatigue? Will this Food Lion really kick me out if I say felt nauseous 10 days ago?”
Maybe you are a good person who assumes they will be reasonable. Or maybe you just lie, and say you felt no symptoms, even if you did. Hernández didn’t even have to lie—he honestly didn’t think of his symptoms as Covid symptoms because they are so common among ballplayers. By making so many Covid guidelines contingent of “if you are experiencing symptoms” without acknowledging how broad and common a category that is, you are setting up rules that people will not be able to realistically follow.
This is all pretty forgivable in a pandemic situation, when the information keeps changing and most people are just trying to do their best. Nobody seems to be blaming Hernández, thankfully, and common sense is often as good a guide as you need.
The problem is that rules like this are not limited to the pandemic. As baseball’s slide rule shows, rules that are impossible to follow have a way of persisting for no good reason. Modern capitalism is full of them. You can’t get health insurance because you filled out a form wrong. You can’t get unemployment because you didn’t through to their broken call-in number. Etc. As I wrote a few months ago, in response to the Great Sticky Stuff Debate, a major political divide is over whether you think of rules as a way to punish people, or as a way to fix things. If you’re the latter, then a rule nobody can follow is not a sign that people need to change their behavior, but that you need to change that rule.