If you’re against unwritten rules, be against all unwritten rules

Jon Morosi writes today that the calls for baseball to legalize pine tar or some other substance for pitchers in cold weather in the wake of the Michael Pineda incident are dumb:

So, because Pineda foolishly and brazenly flaunted baseball’s cold-weather code, Major League Baseball is supposed to tear up its rule book? . . . The Yankees have lost Pineda for 10 games, because they did a poor job of communicating baseball’s unwritten rules: You can’t use pine tar . . . but you actually can . . . everybody does it . . . you just need to be careful . . . it’s probably a good idea to rub it on your glove or belt loop so that the umpire and TV cameras can’t see.

Repeating myself from yesterday, I’m not sure how people are supposed to accept the directly conflicting ideas that (a) “there is absolutely nothing wrong with using pine tar and everyone else does it"; with (b) “by God, don’t let anyone see you doing it, you idiot!” It’s either wrong or it’s right, cheating or not, isn’t it? We can talk about how severe a case of cheating it is and whether it warrants big discipline or little discipline, but things are either allowed or they are not. If they are not, criticizing people for not being sneaky enough in doing it seems like a really dumb message.

And, in this case, a bit of an inconsistent one from Morosi, who has quite admirably advocated for doing way with baseball’s silly and antiquated “unwritten rules.” Indeed, just four days ago he quite wisely said that baseball needs to get over itself with the unwritten rules and dumb codes of respect some people have read into the game regarding bat-tossing, admiring home runs and on-field exuberance. Now he’s all for the same sort of silly code about how one does or does not properly break rules.

Of course, given the guy’s track record on consistency, perhaps I shouldn’t be all that surprised here.