[If you watch a documentary on Silverbacks, or really on any species other than our own, you realize that unwritten rules are what govern life on this planet. In the case of baseball, the known rules are so well-established that it’s hard to not be fascinated by the ones in the fuzzy gray zone. I’m disappointed that this article did not have more specific examples of where and how the unwritten rules were violated. Imagine if you wrote a book about the unwritten rules of relationships?SB SM PS–I am not responsible for the annoying way thaqt this writer accords full paragraph status to single sentences. I’ve left them as he wrote them. You decide.]
https://dougglanville.substack.com/p/unwritten-rules-on-baseball-tradition
Unwritten Rules: On baseball, tradition and the rules we learn without being taught
Why throwing them all away misses the point
Sep 11, 2026
I understand the recurring complaint about baseball’s unwritten rules. It is a complaint that resurfaces daily on the biggest baseball stage—Major League Baseball. A brawl unfolds from a perceived slight, a celebration is judged to be over the top, an alarm goes off because someone is daring not to play the game the “right way.”
I grew up in the game, and these rules are passed down like an old heirloom, sometimes becoming a cult-like statue that every player needs to worship before he ever picks up a bat.
Players repeat them, cultivate them, pass them down like generational wealth or a virus, depending on how you see it. They are taught even when we cannot trace their roots or explain their reasoning. They are a window into larger reflexes of society, as we hold on to old tropes, hierarchies, and convenient othering because someone did not follow rules we cannot explain or remember who created.
Yet in our frustration with these rules, we often lose perspective when we consider them only in isolation.
We focus on Jefry Yan jumping into the sky with exuberance after striking out a major-league opponent, and all the divided opinions about it. We take the criticism of his celebration as another knock against unwritten rules. But we forget that some of the most important things in our lives are unwritten.
Things we preserve, fight for, even die for.
Invisible but present. Silent yet loud. Thin but dependable. Sustained by word of mouth, a dinner grace committed to memory, a cookie recipe in our heads. And eventually turned into action: a young child holding the door open for someone, delivering a meal for family friends with a newborn, helping an older neighbor shovel his car out of a parking spot. We are surrounded by consequential things in life that are not written down. We live them out intentionally and often on auto-pilot.
Of course, there is already an entire world we rely on that is written down. We have tax codes and mortgages, recipes for cooking food, manuals for assembling furniture, signs for where to park, and instructions for what to do when the ball gets stuck in the ivy at Wrigley Field.
There is plenty written down, but we constantly edit, challenge, ignore, or repurpose it. Mostly because living life does not play out on a page.
Written rules are guidelines, inspirations, even history. But our humanity compels us to adapt them to make them livable. Sometimes the principles come first. We do not need to find a sentence in the Constitution telling us that people deserve to be treated equally. The law can eventually recognize a principle that people have spent generations fighting to make real. They did not need to read that somewhere first. The principle was already unwritten, understood, and worth fighting for.
My playing days taught me that the idea behind unwritten rules was not just an annoyance and pure pettiness, even though it can certainly be both. At their best, those rules were a flawed and biased framework for teaching us to respect our opponents, win with grace, and understand that when you put on that uniform, you represent something bigger than yourself.
Rick Monday ran out and pulled the American flag from a protester without knowing every line in the Bill of Rights. Jim Rice carried an injured child from the stands without a parenting guide. Catchers check on umpires who get hit by foul balls without a medical ethics policy. Players throw balls into the stands for young fans without a customer-service manual. A rookie may let a veteran player take the better seat without consulting an AARP guide to respect.
And yes, a pitcher may get annoyed if a hitter steps on his mound while he is in the middle of an inning because somewhere along the way, he was taught that he is the keeper of that space and must manicure it so he can perform his best.
Silly, maybe, to everyone who is not a pitcher.
But even as a hitter, I never ran onto the mound after an out was recorded. I respected his space, just as he had to respect mine by not throwing a ball at me intentionally.
No one wrote that down. No one pulled a pocket baseball treaty from his sleeve. No one cited a passage from a dusty tome.
It was just being human—failure, respect, insecurity, and all.
And yes, sometimes we need to evolve. We need to acknowledge and retire the lingering impact of rules that were created, explicitly or implicitly, to keep certain people out. Rules that can still hide beneath the language of tradition, fashion, and expression.
Still, we will probably replace one unwritten rule with another.
In part because unwritten rules are not just about etiquette. Sometimes they are how people who have lived through something difficult teach the next generation how to survive it.
Dusty Baker has a new book in which he writes about how Black players looked out for each other during his playing days. Not just teammates, but Black players on opposing teams as well. They were constantly connected because they were helping pave the way for social change while trying to support one another through the ever-present reality of second-class citizenship.
No one sent over a memorandum of understanding for a group of people with shared experience to help them navigate a complicated and discriminatory world.
So Shawon Dunston took me out to buy new big-league clothes when I first got called up. I gave Jimmy Rollins a gift when I signed back with the Phillies because he agreed to give me back my playing number, which he had worn the one year I was gone.
That was the standard passed down.
No one needed to look it up.
It was taking care of the next generation because we had been taken care of.
It is a vast oversimplification to focus on the most dramatic, and probably nonsensical, aspects of unwritten rules and declare them all null and void. From the outside, it is hard to explain, but there are clear moments when they seem stupid from the inside, too, so we can agree on that.
I have been part of my share of brawls. Most of the time when you are in one, you are trying to unpack why you would want to throw a punch at someone in the same fraternity that was not directly involved. The guy you played with in winter ball. The coach who mentored you in the minor leagues, who just happens to be wearing the opposing uniform that season.
But having someone’s back on your team is not controversial, even when you later realize your teammate was the instigator and may have been in the wrong. The unwritten rule was simple: you had his back, not necessarily because you agreed with him, but because he was your teammate. You could disagree with what he did and still stand there, on his side.
A baseball coming at you at 100 miles per hour is thrown by someone you have to trust. When you cannot trust him, or he has the wrong idea about what to do with the power in his hand, it can easily spill into chippiness.
I remember when we had tension with the Arizona Diamondbacks. After things dissipated, I was the one leading off the next inning with Randy Johnson on the mound.
I kept thinking, I could die here.
But I was also thinking, He better know the weapon he has in his arm and use it responsibly.
It was not a comfortable at-bat.
I charged the mound once in Double-A, and in my mind, it was justified. The pitcher threw not once but twice over my head because he had given up a home run in a blowout to the batter before me. I was just pinch-hitting.
He wanted me to charge. He dared me to charge.
I knew it was coming, so I told my teammates before I got to the plate.
So I charged him and ended up at the bottom of some pile after knocking him off the mound.
Did it accomplish anything?
Probably not, other than earning a $35 fine from the president of the league.
Somewhere along my baseball life, I had come to think that was a reasonable response to someone throwing a 90-mile-per-hour pitch at my head. Sure, he missed, and maybe even on purpose, but he had no idea which way I might choose to get out of the way, potentially ending up with a baseball in my earhole.
So I charged.
This is not war, by any stretch. But it is a team at the highest level, and you do need to trust each other, even if you do not necessarily like each other. Throwing at someone’s head was a violation of that trust.
I have been hit by pitches and knew when they were intentional, including by that same team the following week, when they hit me with the first pitch of the game. I tried to diffuse the situation by not retaliating, even telling the first baseman, “I am going to let it go.”
It still led to four more brawls that day.
That was excessive—absurd, even—especially considering that one of those brawls broke out at home plate during the exchange of lineup cards before Game 2 of the doubleheader.
Playing the peacemaker did not work. If anything, it became an example of how unwritten rules can get carried away.
The funny thing about that brawl is that the next day, I went to pick up my parents, who had been at the game, at their hotel. The elevator opened, and inside was the manager of the other team. His face was covered in shiners and knots.
He told me they were not throwing at me.
I told him they were, and that it was fine.
Then we rode an awkward elevator to my parents’ floor.
When people become real to you, the rules become something different.
It seemed like a rule had been broken when the manager of another team was punched like a punching bag during a brawl.
Maybe that is why baseball has rules about more than just what happens between the lines. It has rules about how close you are allowed to get to the people on the other side of them.
At one point, the Cubs had a fraternization rule that our manager, Jim Riggleman, took very seriously. He did not like his players talking to the other team at all.
It was settled that he would give us 30 seconds to greet an opponent or a fine would be levied. He even created another unwritten rule: when we were warming up on the foul line and running toward center field, we had to run to the gaps so we did not meet the other team in the middle of the field.
That was my first two years in the big leagues.
Was he right?
He was teaching us something of value, even if there is plenty of nuance to argue about.
Unwritten all the way.
And maybe that is where most unwritten rules actually come from. Not from some official doctrine, but from people spending so much time together that they develop a language of their own.
When you peel back the layers, these players you spend an inordinate amount of time with become like brothers. They ride an incredible rollercoaster with you around a game we all love.
That love is immeasurable, indescribable, and certainly not in any book.
It comes out in moments that never leave the locker room: celebrating a firstborn, a wedding, a surprise birthday party, a milestone, a call-up for the first time. We had kangaroo courts, private concerts, team meetings, and turned-over tables. We could joke about the clubhouse manager in Indianapolis. We can reminisce about sleeping in an airport with players from the U.S. Women’s Soccer team.
We did the impossible, the crazy, the passionate, together, where no one else could see it.
We tell stories that never end because there will never be enough time to tell them. Those stories are part of the unwritten history of the game.
I define a midlife crisis as a baseball player who one day realizes that he could never tell all the baseball stories that shaped him because his time on earth is not enough.
That gold mine of shared experiences around a passion shapes these unwritten rules far more than the egomaniacal pettiness of whether you can bunt during a no-hitter after the sixth inning or steal when up by more than five runs after the fifth.
Ironically, the biggest problem with those rules may be that someone tried to write them down. Once they hit the page, they stopped making sense.
But the spirit behind them—do not rub the other team’s face in it during a blowout—is a perfectly reasonable principle to put some boundaries around.
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As for Jefry Yan, I have the luxury of being both a former player and a baseball analyst. I can take a breath and learn about his incredible story of perseverance without losing the joy of what he is expressing.
Born in the Dominican Republic, he was out of baseball for years after Tommy John surgery, working as a roofer and doing whatever else he could find. He eventually resurfaced in a random Arizona beer league, where a scout discovered him. He ended up pitching in Japan. Then, at 30 years old, he became a rookie in the big leagues.
Amazing.
I am not trying to get a hit off of him. I am not trying to find his weaknesses so I can beat him.
Big difference.
But I understand why he jumps to the sky.
It is pure appreciation, not an attempt to embarrass the other team. And even though he has now been optioned to Triple-A, that does not change what those moments meant. He made it to the big leagues. He experienced the thing he had spent years fighting to reach. For now, his time in the majors is on pause, but his story is not over.
If anything, his brief arrival gives us another reason to look at the celebration differently. The more we learn about him, the more we understand what that joy represents.
By creating the conversation, by giving people the chance to understand his story, he has already passed one test of his arrival.
He is a big leaguer. Period.
No one can take that away from him for any reason whatsoever.
And if he returns to the majors, as I hope he does, he will continue to weave himself into big-league culture. He will still likely face pressure to tone it down from opponents and teammates alike. A broader call to reshape his celebration. Opponents may do it through mock imitation; teammates may do it more like mentors, sharing the expectations of the game. Then there are the practical realities of when to celebrate. After all, you cannot be mid-jump during an ABS challenge or a pickoff attempt.
He may even pull a muscle jumping that high after every strikeout.
But maybe people will take the time to learn his story and reconsider the rules he is breaking.
And that is not unprecedented. Baseball has been known to evolve slowly, often because someone was willing to challenge an unwritten rule, quietly inspiring others to question it as well, and over time, making room for the rule to soften.
Wally Yonamine was one of the great players in baseball history, a Japanese American who transformed baseball norms in Japan. Some of that came from his hard-nosed play which ruffled traditional, polite feathers.
But other changes came from something more personal.
When his first child was born during his playing days, the team did not let him be there with his wife.
Unwritten rule.
Many years later, when he became a manager, he changed that for his players and staff. He made sure families were around during the summer.
No one appointed him an attorney to change the laws or rewrite the code of ethics.
He simply changed the rule for his team.
That is the other side of unwritten rules.
And in the show, you make some tradeoffs to work within a new culture. Some good. Some bad. Many neutral.
So next time an unwritten rule pops up and makes no sense whatsoever, hold up for a moment.
It is fine to think it is ridiculous, even after you have been given more context. But when the issue goes beyond individual ego, it is worth asking what the rule is trying to govern in spirit.
Most of the time, the impulse is positive: to establish some standard of interplay. To preserve history. To respect the game, your team, the umpires, your opponent, and the ground on which you play.
Life is full of rules we abide by. Some are written down to create clarity, consistency, and accountability. Others are unwritten, shaped by experience, tradition and the shared understanding of community. We need both. Written rules establish the boundaries. Unwritten rules help determine how we live within them and sometimes show us when those boundaries need to move. And the two inform each other, constantly.
Often, like a child before they can read, those unwritten rules are felt, sensed, deduced, heartfelt, and found between the lines.
If there are lines.
And because of that, they are left to interpretation.
When it comes to a hyper-competitive group setting, it takes a culture to bring those rules to life. That does not mean they cannot be reinterpreted, rethought, or adapted. It just means change is slow work.
We know that habit and tradition are hard to dismiss after one player arrives jumping to the sky.
But maybe, in the end, he is not breaking the rule.
Maybe he is reminding us what the rule was always supposed to protect.
The written rules keep the game fair. And the unwritten ones help keep it human.
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