We were born in Venezuela, so naturally, we like baseball. As Venezuelans, we share this passion with the United States. In addition to being Venezuelan, we are also husband and wife—one an economist, the other a lawyer.
We often find ourselves in intense discussions on various topics—perhaps because one of us leans more libertarian and the other more conservative, in the American sense. Despite our disagreements, we’ve reached a fundamental point of consensus: baseball is the best sport to illustrate the political ideal of the Rule of Law—and, by extension, the principles of a free-market economy.
Several years ago, Professor Paul Finkelman published an insightful essay titled Baseball and the Rule of Law. Later, George F. Will released his seminal book Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. These and other works have presented compelling arguments about the deep relationship between this seemingly simple game and the legal-political foundations of ordered liberty.
For those who prefer video, Will also has a PragerU clip that introduces these ideas and is sometimes used in university classrooms to highlight how a sport can reflect deeper civic values.
Decades earlier, the Danish jurist Alf Ross and the Italian legal philosopher Norberto Bobbio addressed the importance of rules in games—distinguishing between the rules of the game itself and those of strategy. Ross’s chess analogy became particularly well-known: just as the rules of chess define what counts as a legal move (e.g., how a bishop moves), legal rules define the framework within which actions are judged—not unlike the difference between following the rules and playing well.
Critics such as Eduardo García Máynez argued that game rules don’t belong to the legal realm but to the domain of social conventions. Still, sports often serve as powerful metaphors for understanding good legal systems.
Why Rules Matter
Baseball, in particular, can offer a clearer picture of how an order based on the Rule of Law functions, often more effectively than abstract legal theories. In our marriage, Jesús, dedicated to constitutional law, often struggles to communicate the virtues and failures of legal systems to students through historical, theoretical, and comparative lenses. Meanwhile, Andrea, the economist, grappling with complex schools of thought (from the Austrian School to others), often returns to one fundamental truth: any society that aspires to a free-market economy, even hypocritically, must rely on a strong institutional framework—a set of formal and informal rules.
In much of Latin America—especially in Venezuela and, to a lesser extent, in Guatemala, where we currently live—there is no true culture of the Rule of Law. These are societies where legality is met with suspicion and where people tend to dislike arbitrators. The ideal of impartial, independent judges is not widely valued or aspired to.
In Venezuela, where baseball has a deeper cultural footprint than in Guatemala, the sport has at least achieved one notable success: racial integration. However, due to the legacy of Spanish colonialism and its caste-based society, the law in our countries often resembles the rulebook of American football—cryptic and accessible only to “shamans” or legal specialists. Rather than fostering a culture of legality, our societies celebrate brute force, a tendency reflected in our preference for soccer or American football, where territorial conquest and military-style tactics eclipse the cooperative strategies of doux commerce. Even in the United States, these hierarchical, showy, and tribal elements—epitomized by the Super Bowl—have gained ground.
Enter the ‘Torpedo Bat’
This insight came to us during a conversation about the debate surrounding the so-called “torpedo bat,” a new and innovative piece of baseball equipment. Unlike standard bats, it is flared and a little like a bowling pin, with the weight focused where it is needed. It was created by a University of Michigan physics professor who graduated from MIT, and it made waves by enabling players to hit harder with more control.
It began as a luxury product, accessible only to a few. But thanks to market forces and the entrepreneurial pursuit of efficiency, that luxury has become widely available. As demand grew, at least seven companies entered the market, increasing supply and pushing the price down to the level of standard professional bats. This is how the market with rules-based order evolves.
Good rules don’t eliminate inequality or stop innovation; they channel both towards access and efficiency. The New York Yankees—though not our favorite team—offer a case study in the power of general rules (as opposed to mandates). These rules have fostered a diverse range of strategic approaches and contractual arrangements, spurring technological innovation in gloves, bats, uniforms, and stadiums. The culture of innovation allows wealthy teams like the Yankees to finance R&D and continuously improve the game.
Few sports embody this kind of decentralized, capitalist innovation like baseball.
Baseball and Institutions
Baseball is not immune to institutional erosion. The introduction of centralized reviews, which override the authority of on-field umpires, signals a subtle erosion of the Rule of Law’s cultural foundation. We’re not saying that American football should be abolished; rather, we’re explaining how these games offer a pedagogical opportunity to compare the institutional rules of a society. For a more light-hearted take, George Carlin’s famous stand-up routine draws brilliant contrasts between football and baseball.
The cultural appreciation for baseball, once seen as a symbol of American civic values, seems to be waning in favor of sports like American football, which align more closely with the emotional spectacle preferred by progressive culture. Baseball, with its emphasis on restraint, strategy, and general rules, represents a kind of institutional logic that contrasts sharply with the immediacy and force celebrated elsewhere. Progressive culture struggles to appreciate a slow-paced sport with a long season, driven by statistics and general rules that foster complex strategies. Baseball has also had to evolve into an entertainment product. With fewer euphoric moments than soccer goals, the pressure to produce more home runs has become a matter of survival.
The trouble with baseball—much like with constitutionalism—is that its text and its underlying values are difficult to transplant elsewhere. Reading The Federalist Papers or the works of Randy Barnett and Akhil Reed Amar is not enough; a historical and moral culture is required for the spirit of the text to take root.
We may not be fans of the Yankees, but we do hope entrepreneurs south of the Río Grande might someday learn, if only 1%, of what that team has achieved through discipline, innovation, and rules that let the best ideas win.
