Changing Rules Retroactively

When the 1981 major league baseball season began, there was a real danger of a strike in the middle of the season if management and the players’ union couldn’t come to a new collective bargaining agreement. But while the two sides were coming to heads against each other both behind the scenes and in front of the press, the teams went on with their schedules and played ball. Until about one third of the way through the regular season, that is, and then the strike began, ultimately consuming the middle third of the 1981 regular season. When the strike finally ended and play was to resume, the owners, trying to regenerate interest in all of the baseball cities, declared 1981 to be a split season. Whoever was ahead in each division at the end of the retroactively-declared “first season” was declared that division’s winner and was eligible for the post-season playoffs, which would also include the newly-invented second-half’s “winners”. The result was that the team with the best overall major league record that year, the Cincinnati Reds (66-42), missed the playoffs, while a team with an overall losing record, the Kansas City Royals (50-53), made the playoffs! All because of an expedient change of the rules without regard to the fact that none of the teams, up to the moment of the strike’s onset, had any inkling of the stakes involved in being ahead at that moment. So, in the National League West, Los Angeles had a 36-21 record while Cincinnati, feeling pretty good about themselves (Their ace pitcher Tom Seaver was having a banner year) was only ½ game behind at 35-21. Unfortunately for them, the greedy folks in charge of baseball changed the rules in mid-stream. Houston barely beat out the Reds in the “second season”, shutting the best team in baseball out of a chance to go to the World Series that year.

I think everybody gets a gut feeling of injustice when something like this happens. The ground rules are set for something in a particular arena of society, people act according to those rules, and then, after the fact, the rules are changed to effect a different outcome.

The 2000 Presidential Election is another example of this occurrence, with transgressions instigated from both sides. In the crucial, incredibly close state of Florida, Democratic lawyers, soon after the election, initially pushed for manual recounts only in the three South Florida counties that went for Gore, hoping that counting rejected, misread, and uncounted ballots in those counties would tip the scales for their candidate. In my opinion, this was a big strategic error on their part, in two ways. One, these actions tilted public opinion against Gore and for Bush. Two, they wasted too much time trying to do this when the only fair, viable option was a statewide manual recount, which the Florida Supreme Court finally mandated. But then the US Supreme Court stepped in, and in its Bush vs. Gore decision, overruled the State Supreme Court’s decision and halted the recount, effectively electing Bush to the Presidency. This, too, was changing the rules after the fact, since it was Constitutionally a state’s mandated responsibility that it decide for itself how it was going to choose its electors to represent it in the Electoral College! In the midst of all this grew the feeling that it wasn’t the people who mattered, but rather which side had the most aggressive lawyers and well-positioned judges acting on their behalf.

As a kid, have you ever found yourself playing a game of tag with another kid who refused to ever allow you to win? You’d be “it”, and, just as you’re about to tag him or her, the sore loser of a brat would suddenly find something to touch and declare it to be “base”. But the kid wouldn’t respect it if you did the same thing. That’s the impression I get of the people who pull the rug out from under others by changing rules after-the-fact. They’re immature, sore losers who have no right to be in positions of leadership. The only thing they’re good at is creating “bases” to shield themselves from accountability for their actions.