The Legalities of Baseball: Fan Interference, Ball Ownership, & the Constitution

Episode Notes

Transcript

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

You have to respect the judge. You have to respect the umpire. And baseball, as I said at the beginning, is a very legalistic game. There are complex rules, and by the way, there are some players who are brilliant at manipulating those rules.

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J. Craig Williams:

Welcome to Lawyer to Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams, coming to you from Southern California. I write a blog named May It please the court once in a while and have three books out titled How To Get Sued the Sled and My newest book. How would You Decide 10 Famous Trials That Changed History? You can find all three on Amazon. In addition, our new podcast miniseries in dispute, 10 famous trials that changed history. It’s currently available here on the Legal Talk Network and on your favorite podcasting app. Please listen and subscribe and as a special today, we’ll include a teaser of the first five minutes of the latest episode of the Black Sox trial, all about baseball. Well, let’s talk about baseball. It’s America’s favorite pastime, a wonderful game with its share of controversy. On October 30th, 2024, the World Series wrapped with the Los Angeles Dodgers beating the New York Yankees four to one in the World Series.

In the third game of the series at Yankee Stadium, there was a controversial play in the Los Angeles Dodgers, right fielder Mookie Betts, and two New York Yankees fans who tried to rip the ball out of his glove during a play. A prime example of fan interference. According to the Yankees, the fans were rejected from the game due to their egregious and unacceptable physical contact. Well, today on lawyer to Lawyer, we’re going to be spotlighting baseball law and the regulations. We’re going to take a look at everything from fan interference to who owns the Home Run ball. We’ll also discuss baseball and how it all relates to the Constitution and the American legal system. And to help us better understand today’s topic, we’re joined by returning guest Dr. Paul Finkelman. Paul is currently a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. He’s an expert in American and world slavery, constitutional law, civil liberties, religious liberty, African-American history, American Jewish history, and legal issues surrounding baseball.

And if you don’t believe it, go take a look on Wikipedia. His resume is amazing. He was also the chief expert witness in the lawsuit over the ownership of Barry Bond’s 73rd home run Ball. He’s also the co-author of baseball and the American Legal Mind and has published on baseball and the law in the Atlantic, Washington Monthly, New York Times, and various law reviews. He’s published more than 50 books. Welcome to the show, Paul. It’s a to be here and it’s an absolute delight to have you on the show. How did you become so interested in baseball?

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Well, I grew up in the United States. Do you need to say anything else? It is the American game. I am not particularly athletic. I wasn’t a great player, but I learned to like the game. I taught at Brooklyn Law School for a couple of years in New York and I went to the University of Chicago for graduate school, both of which are great baseball towns. I would go to Cubs games or White Sox games. When I taught at Brooklyn, I would go to Mets games, Yankees games, and as a scholar, I’m interested in law. The more I watched baseball, the more I realized that baseball is the most legalistic sport in the world. It is a sport that revolves around rules and laws, both common law and statutory law. In other words, baseball changes its rules when the rules need to be changed. It reflects what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called the felt necessities of society.

To give you a simple example, the infield fly rule, which says that under certain circumstances a batter is automatically out if there is a fly ball in the infield was designed to prevent fraud because otherwise, if there’s a man on first and a pop fly to the shortstop, the man on first can’t run because the pop fly be caught and the man on first will then get doubled off. But if the shortstop drops the ball, he can then quickly throw it to second base and then to first base and get a double play. So the fielders by intentionally not catching the ball, could create double plays. This came up early on in baseball, by the way, not by an attempted fraud, by an infielder, but rather the infielder simply dropped the ball and then he picked it up and threw the first. He didn’t try to double up the guy who was coming from first to second, but a newspaper wrote about this and said, wow, this would be a great strategy for infielders to intentionally drop the ball so they can get a double play or even a triple play if they’re two men on base.

But major league baseball immediately created the infield fly rule. So you get a rule responding to the felt necessities of baseball. Does that make any sense?

J. Craig Williams:

It makes sense, but the infield fly rule has got to be one of the hardest rules to understand in baseball.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

That’s undoubtedly the case, which is why major league umpires start out as minor league umpires. They go to umpire school. If they’re good in single a ball, they become aa umpire, a AAA umpire, and then they become a major league umpire.

J. Craig Williams:

And your article in the Atlantic described how umpires even have different jurisdictions like they do in the law.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

That’s right. So that in a professional baseball game, there’s an umpire at first, second, third base and one behind the plate. And then in the World Series, and I guess the playoffs, there are a couple of umpires in the outfield as well, and that’s their jurisdiction, but the jurisdiction can change. So for example, if you see a batter, a right-handed batter starting to swing and then stops, and the question is, did he complete the swing? In which case it’s a strike or did he pull his bat back in time? And it isn’t just strike. If the plate umpire says it’s a ball, he didn’t swing, the catcher can appeal to the first base umpire. He has a better view. He’s looking right down at this thing and he can overrule the plate. Umpire, same thing. Third base umpire can overrule a call on a left-handed batter

J. Craig Williams:

Kind of like an appellate court,

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Kind of like an appellate court, and sometimes you see umpires huddle because they’re not sure how to apply the rule. The other really interesting thing about baseball is in most sports, when the coach or the manager as they’re called in baseball, complains about something, they’re basically telling the umpire, you didn’t see what happened. Sometimes they use more vigorous language than that, but you’ll occasionally see a manager come up on the field carrying the rule book, opening the rule book and pointing to the rule book and saying what he’s telling the empire is not that you didn’t see it, but you didn’t apply the rule properly, which is like a lawyer objecting to a ruling by a judge.

J. Craig Williams:

Very much the same. Well, let’s talk about outfield umpires, and in fact, we just wrapped up the World Series between the LA Dodgers and the New York Yankees with thankfully one of this left coast lawyers, Dodgers winning. But let’s take a look at what happened in the outfield.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Well, you do know I live most of the year in New York, so maybe it’s not thankfully.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, it depends on which side of the coast you’re on Out here on the left coast, we’re all happy about it, but on the right coast, not a good day.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

It was not a good series for the Yankees. But let’s get to what we really want to talk about, which is the behavior fans, right?

And you have two incidents in this World series. The first is by a Dodger fan who leans over the wall and has a glove on his hand and catches a ball that appears possibly to be a home run or appears possibly to likely bounce off the very top of the outfield wall and bounce back into the field. If it had been a home run, then the Yankees might’ve won that game. If it had hit the top of the outfield wall with enough force, it might’ve bounced back over the outfielder and been a triple, and that might’ve changed the game Instead, instead, this obnoxious law breaking arrogant punk from LA leans over and grabs the ball and says, aha, I have a souvenir. Now, baseball has had a deal with this in the past, so baseball has a rule, and the rule is that you automatically get a double if there’s fan interference with a fair ball on the field.

I think what you ought to do, I’m anticipating you might ask me this. I think what you ought to do is have a visit from the local district attorney for trespassing on the field and that the LA Dodgers should make a formal criminal complaint against this guy because no fan is allowed to be on the field at all. They’re not allowed to reach over onto the field and send a message to what is a kind of a hooliganism, where fans think that they have a right to interfere with the game. They are spectators, they are not players, and then you get the worst result, the worst instance in Yankee Stadium, right, where two fans appear to be trying to take Mookie bet’s glove off his hand when he’s catching a foul ball. Now, that wouldn’t have affected the game in the sense that it’s a foul ball, and if Mookie bets had dropped the ball, it still would’ve been an out because of fan interference, so they didn’t interfere with the outcome of the game. But again, what they did was I think common law battery.

J. Craig Williams:

I don’t disagree with you, but let’s get a definition first because I have a question that hinges on this definition. What constitutes the field is the field, the plane, where the mats are, the vertical plane, where the mats are, is it where the horizontal playing, where the mat extends over the top of the guardrail? Where does the field begin and where does it end?

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

I think the field begins and ends in the same place with the walls, whether they are a low fencing or a high wall in the outfield, that everything on the inside of those walls is field, and what’s on the inside of those walls essentially goes up in the air so that you can’t reach over the wall with your glove in the air and pull a ball that has not gone over the fence,

J. Craig Williams:

Right? The vertical plane of the wall, the

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Vertical plane of the wall for the entire field. And what I wish Major League baseball would do is to, after this World Series, again, change the rules to say that every stadium has to tell people that it is against the rules of baseball and it is against the law to trespass on the field, and should they do so that they will face the potential of legal action against them. And I think because otherwise what we’re just encouraging is lawlessness. I get, okay, I get the idea that a fan says, wow, there’s a ball in the air and I can catch it and I will have the best souvenir of my life. But if you reach over the fence and catch that ball, you are in effect stealing the ball from the home team. The home team owns the ball, and that ball belongs to the home team as long as it is in the vertical plane, if you want to put it that way, of it’s in play.

It is in play, it is on the field. I’ll give you another example. By the way, when the Boston Red Sox, after what two, 300 years of playing professional baseball finally won the World Series in the early two thousands, right? The final play of the game was a ball hit back to the pitcher who picked it up and threw it to first base. The first baseman caught it. That was the last out. And what the first baseman did, a guy named Envi was to put it in his pocket and take it home. Okay? That’s theft. That ball does not belong to him. It does not even belong to the Boston Red Sox because it’s a St. Louis Cardinals home game. So it belongs to the St. Louis Cardinals, and he has taken the property of the St. Louis Cardinals and pocketed it, and of course, he goes back the next day, gets it verified by the umpire as the last ball of the game, and then a year later he tries to sell it,

J. Craig Williams:

Not his to sell.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

It’s not his to sell. It’s not his to have. It’s not his to own. Exactly.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Paul, we’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to Lawyer to Lawyer. I’m joined by Dr. Paul Finkelman. He’s the distinguished visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and coauthor of the book Baseball and the American Legal Mind as well as many others. But the question that you talked about before the break about who owns the ball during the World Series, I watched it. I saw a player toss the ball into the stands. Who owns that ball?

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Well, okay, this might be called what we’d call law is the new Common Law of baseball. And the new common law of baseball says that players, when they pick up a foul ball or when they make a routine out on the field,

J. Craig Williams:

Finish an inning,

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Finish an inning, they’re allowed to toss the ball into the stands or give it to somebody. Sometimes you see a player walk over and give it to a little kid. Now, that wasn’t always the case before 1919. Every game began with a single baseball, and they would play the whole game with one baseball

J. Craig Williams:

No matter how torn up it got

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Or warm, no matter how dirty, it got to the point where it’s virtually black. And as a result of that, by the end of the game, if it’s an afternoon game and the sun’s going down, it’s pretty hard to see the baseball. Okay, fine. So in any event, before 1920, the ball was used for the entire game. In August of 1920, a player named Ray Chapman got hit in the head with a baseball that he was batting, and the pitcher hit him in the head and killed him, and he couldn’t see the ball because it was dark. Sun was going down, they don’t have lights, it’s a dirty ball at the end of the game, hits Chapman, and then they don’t have batting helmets, and he’s the only player who’s ever been killed in a baseball game the following year. Major League baseball requires that the teams change the balls when they get dirty.

And so initially you might use the same ball for 1, 2, 3 innings and then have another ball. Okay? Now, baseballs are relatively inexpensive. They’re not a great investment, so it’s not a lot of money to change the balls. The other thing that’s going on at this time is that there’s this new young player named George Herman Ruth, better known as Babe Ruth, who has developed a new style of hitting before Babe Ruth comes along, batters try to hit hard line drives and get a single or a double or a triple. And Ruth discovers that if you hit upwards, if you have an upswing, you can actually knock the ball over the fence. And so suddenly balls are flying out of the stadium into the stands. Initially, in the old days before 1920, the ushers would retrieve these balls and throw ’em back onto the field to play, but now they’re letting people keep the balls, and so the ball becomes a great souvenir,

J. Craig Williams:

And it’s been that way for a long time.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

It’s been that way starting in 1920. Not every team adopts this. In 1921, the Philadelphia Phillies threw some kid out of the game and actually tried to have him prosecuted for theft for keeping a foul ball as late as 1945. The Cleveland Indians required that fans throw balls back onto the field if they went into the stands. But since 1945, no team has been making people return the balls. Part of the thrill of the baseball game is catching a ball, taking it home with you. It’s great publicity.

J. Craig Williams:

Teams love it. The players love it.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

The players love it. The fans love it. The teams don’t care because baseballs are an insignificant amount of money. 12, 15 bucks for ball. When you’re paying players millions of dollars, the cost of a baseball is meaningless and it’s a great thing. But what you now have is an increasing notion of the rule of the jungle. You now have fans interfering with the game

J. Craig Williams:

In order to get a ball because that ball suddenly becomes valuable if it’s hit by the right person at the right time in the right part of the game.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

And so if that’s what’s going to happen, then I think Major League Baseball has to respond by saying, we do not condone that. You’re not going to keep the ball. You’re going to get kicked out of the stadium. If you’re a season ticket holder, like one of the guys at Yankee Stadium, the team might say, lots of people would like to have a season ticket. You’re not going to have one next year.

J. Craig Williams:

And that’s in fact what happened to this guy, isn’t it?

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Well, he wasn’t allowed to go to the next World Series game. I don’t know whether he’s lost his season ticket privileges or not.

J. Craig Williams:

The articles I’ve read has said that they yanked his season ticket.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Well, they should.

J. Craig Williams:

And you think he should be prosecuted?

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Well, maybe I’m being a little harsh here. I think first you have to have notice. I don’t think,

J. Craig Williams:

Of course you do,

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

But I think it’s pretty much common sense that anybody in the United States knows you can’t try and pull the glove off a baseball player in the middle of a game

J. Craig Williams:

Or the ball out of his glove

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Or the ball out of his glove, that there is a point. And think about this, they could have permanently injured a professional baseball player. He could have had his wrist broken, he could have had his hand broken. He could have twisted a leg or his back. With this, if you’re up in the air, if your hand’s up in the air and you’re off balance and somebody grabs your glove hand, that’s dangerous, potentially dangerous.

J. Craig Williams:

Now, in this instance, if the vertical plane of the field is where the stands end and the field begins, what’s the rule when Mookie reaches over that plane and tries to catch the ball? Is the reverse true? Is he trespassing on something and is he out of bounds?

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

No, I don’t think he is. And so you would force me to say that the field extends in the air to the extent that a player can reach over the fence and catch a ball

J. Craig Williams:

For the player, for the player, not for the guest. The

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Guest can’t interfere with that.

J. Craig Williams:

Now, what happens if mookie’s nowhere near the ball and the fan reaches over and grabs it from the field? That’s the double.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Well, but you see where Mookie is. It’s a foul ball. So there’s no problem. There’s no problem. It’s a foul ball. Yeah, no, but what they can’t do is if there’s a ball heading towards the center field wall and there’s no center field where they’re likely to catch it, they can’t reach over and grab the ball because they’re interfering with the game period. That’s the situation of the La Dodger fan. There was no chance that the Dodger outfielder was going to catch that ball, but the fan can’t interfere and baseball has to clean up his act. It’s act the baseball. If you go to a stadium on their website or posted in the stadium, there’ll be verbiage such as fans are allowed to keep balls and objects that go into the stands. So if there’s a broken bat and the piece of the bat flies into the stands and you catch it, you’re allowed to keep it. They could also add to that posting. However, fans may not interfere at any time with a player trying to catch a ball that is either in play or is a foul ball, and fans may not reach over the fence to interfere with the ball.

J. Craig Williams:

It’s going to be an interesting rule to interpret when the player leaps over the fence and falls into the stands, grabbing the ball and the fans catch him. Don’t catch him. Let him fall into the chairs. How is that going to work?

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Human nature I think will step in and they’ll try to prevent him from killing himself.

J. Craig Williams:

That’s more likely.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

That’s more likely. And if that happens, then the baseball teams should find those fans and say, Hey, come down after the game and get some autographs. We’re going to give you an autographed ball. You help protect our player. Lots of things that the teams can do anyways, that’s what I think has to happen. Otherwise, it becomes the law of the jungle.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, it’s time for a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to Lawyer to Lawyer. I’m back with Dr. Paul Finkelman, distinguished visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, and also the co-author of a book, baseball and the American Legal Mind. I’m interested to hear your thoughts about how baseball parallels with the Constitution.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Well, I think baseball teaches all Americans to mostly agree to a set of laws and rules to govern society. Think of the situation where you have a big kid, big, strong, young kid with a lethal weapon in his hand called a baseball bat, and the umpire says, strike three. The kid doesn’t turn around and swing the bat at the umpire. The kid meekly walks back to the dugout. You almost never, ever, ever hear of a baseball player attacking an umpire. And part of that is because they’re very strict rules about that. If the player touches the umpire, the player’s going to going to get thrown out of the game. There was a Yankee manager who when he would argue with an umpire, would clasp his hands behind his back and turn his hat around so that the bill of the cap wouldn’t touch the umpire. He’d go to nose to nose with the umpire, but he was careful not to touch him. You touch the empire, you’re thrown out of the game.

J. Craig Williams:

Some of them kicked dirt on their shoes.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Yeah, that’s probably not allowed either. These are things you can’t do. You have to respect the judge. You have to respect the umpire. And baseball, as I said at the beginning, is a very legalistic game. There are complex rules, and by the way, there are some players who are brilliant at manipulating those rules, at using those rules. Give you one great example, Reggie Jackson in a World Series game is on first base, there’s a ball hit to the shortstop, tosses it to the second baseman. Jackson’s now out, and then the second baseman turns around and throws it to the first baseman, and Jackson’s hip sort of sticks out a little and the ball hits Jackson’s hip and it bounces into the outfield. The batter is now safe at first base, the other team’s manager comes screaming out at a dugout that’s interference with the play. Well, what’s the penalty for interference with the play?

J. Craig Williams:

No idea.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

You’re out.

J. Craig Williams:

He’s already out.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

That’s right. Jackson had read the rules very carefully and he understood it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. Save it for a World Series. He’s already out. So the ball bounces off Jackson, the runner is safe. At first

J. Craig Williams:

He’s out again for two outs.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

No, he can’t be out for two outs, he’s out. But baseball immediately changes the rules to say, if this happens, the runner going to first is also out

J. Craig Williams:

If it’s intentional on the part of the,

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

If it’s intentional on the part, and obviously in any legal situation, men’s Ray, a guilty mind intentionality matters a good deal. But it was clear what Jackson did was intentional and it was within the rules of the game. And the result is you have to change the rule of the game. That’s why almost every law professor I know is a baseball fan because it’s this that makes so much sense, really complex legal system. And I once was sent to Columbia in South America by the United States State Department to give some lectures on developing a notion of the rule of law in Columbia. And what I said was is that if we really want to do this, we should ship over hundreds of gloves and balls and bats and teach all Colombian kids to play baseball because then they will grow up with a sense of rule of law. Now, that may be an exaggeration, and that may be silly, but I do think that baseball creates a code of a rule of law, by the way, does Japan is the most rule of law place I’ve ever visited. It’s a very honest place, very honest rules, and baseball fits perfectly well with Japanese culture.

J. Craig Williams:

That’s a great observation. Well, Paul, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you very much for enlightening us about the rules of baseball and the rule of law.

Dr. Paul Finkelman:

Thank you. It’s been a delight. I’ll see you next season.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, here’s a few of my thoughts about today’s topic. I think Dr. Finkelman is exactly right. Baseball and the Constitution go hand in hand from the standpoint of the way the rules work and how we need to respect the rule of the law, and certainly with the recent election, that’ll become something we’ll be thinking about as time moves forward. But in the meantime, as a lawyer, I think I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the baseball game and its structure and respect of the rule of law. Well, if you’d like what you heard today, please rate us on Apple Podcast to your favorite podcasting app. You can also visit [email protected] where you can sign up for our newsletter. If you want to hear more about baseball, stay tuned and check out our latest episode of In Dispute on the Legal Talk Network, the Chicago Black Sox trial, how eight players Went from the Dugout to the Courtroom. And I’m Craig Williams. Thanks for listening. Please join us next time for another great legal topic. Remember when you want legal think lawyer to lawyer

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