Do major sports have too many rules?

The Game Room
21

Reality Chuck, your statements and evidence about the behind the scenes stuff with the Premier League is spot on. amarone might also keep in mind things like transfer windows, which limit player movement, etc.

However, I’m going to call you on the Laws of Soccer. Go out and buy the Laws of Soccer sometime. It’s an incredibly thin book. Even including the decisions on the Laws it’s still thin. It runs as many pages as it does because the print is relatively large. But if you were to get out the rule book for Major League Baseball, there is no way you could reduce it to the size of the Laws of the Game (soccer) without using about 3 pt. type. :wink:

22

All the examples I gave from US sports are over and above the types of rules in soccer. They all stem from a common background - US professional sports are run with an attempt to create a competitive situation to maximize the fans’ enjoyment. Hence the draft allows the weakest team to have the first pick of the best players. Salary caps and roster limits inhibit the ability of the wealthy teams to buy success. In contrast, Man UTD. and Chelsea can buy whoever they like, pay them whatever they want, and have as many people on their roster as they wish.

I am not saying that one system is better than the other (well, I would approve of any rule that hits Man Utd), just that there is a significant difference because of these rules.

23

I think you’re starting to get into things that aren’t usually incorporated under the “rules” of a sport as most people would define them. Major League Baseball has a separate set of rules for how rosters and player personnel can be managed that’s so confusing I don’t entirely understand them after about 25 years of trying to. Waiver rules, roster composition rules, options, contractual rules - it’s hideous. But none of them appear in the Official Rules, the rules that govern how the sport is played. They may be rules for a particular league’s management, but are not the rules of baseball, per se.

When I played baseball in senior league at age 15 I was playing under exactly the same rulebook as the Major Leagues uses, on the field, but the roster rules were totally different.

24

That is true - I have been talking about rules imposed by organizations that run the professional leagues of US sports as to how the leagues should be run. That is indeed a separate matter from the rules inherent to the sport itself.

25

How about cricket then? Tons of rules (a dozen ways of getting out) and nothing to do with the USA.

26

I think one point that hasn’t been mentioned so far is that many of the American sports, particularly Football and Baseball, are just significantly more complex than many other sports like Soccer. For instance, Soccer has one method of scoring, football has several; this requires many more rules to define. Soccer advances the ball through a small and simple set of methods, football uses several very different methods; each method requires its own set of rules to govern. Soccer has continuous action, football has segmented action; this requires more rules to decide when it start, when it stops, etc.

In that regard, I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to compare the rules of football to soccer. Some people love soccer precisely because it’s elegant in its simplicity. Some people, like myself, love football because of its complexity.

As other people have mentioned, I think the inherent complexity continues to add more rules because it has a higher degree of special situations that need to be addressed, like the Infield Fly Rule in Baseball. You also have the simple fact, again as someone else mentioned up thread, that many of the American Sports have taken things like parity, and fan interest into account, where this hasn’t been so much the case with other sports. Obvious examples of this are when Baseball raised the pitcher’s mound to reduce a batter’s advantage, or when football moved back where the kickoff is kicked from, to reduce touchbacks and increase action.

So, are there too many rules? I don’t think so. Knowing all the rules isn’t necessarily important to being able to enjoy the game. I know plenty of people who can’t name all the positions in football, and don’t know what they all do. Hell, I even know people who don’t quite understand how downs work and how and why the ball is spotted where it is. The important thing is that the sport is enjoyable to watch and is enjoyable to play.

If anything, I think there often aren’t enough rules, because when people make statements about there being too many rules, it’s usually either because they’re just upset that a particular rule hurts their team in that instance or because the rule is bad. I like the fact that the NFL looks back at controversial calls and rules each year and reevaluates them.

27

Wait, really? These sound like people who still insist Macs only have on button. They’re just being dicks. The infield fly rule is pretty simple to understand if you have a working knowledge of the pretty basic concepts of force-outs and sac flies.

28

I’d be wary of any kind of limitation on letters imposed as an attempt to make rules simpler. You might be surprised how compressed English can become when it needs to be to fit into a designated space. You’d essentially get an incredibly convoluted but logically consistent set of rules that would interact in (sometimes) unexpected ways. You’d have more rules-lawyering and more intricate corner cases than you do now, when the rules are expanded with some repeated information and common-sense explanations explicitly included.

29

Well it all depends on what you consider a “rule”. If you include all the little clarifications for soccer, it’s not a short book. If you stick to the major rules for baseball, it’s simple too.

30

The sacrifice fly’s a scoring concept and doesn’t have anything to do with it.

Trust me, they’re not being dicks. I dealt with this probably two thirds of the time I ever called an infield fly. A common occurrence would be that the ball would be dropped. The runners would then be shouted at to run, because the offensive team would think the dropped ball meant the batter wasn’t out and they had to advance (wrong.) Then the defensive team would either whip the ball to first (pointless, since the batter’s out already) or would throw it to another base and wouldn’t tag the runner, thinking it was a force play (it’s not.)

Sometimes a runner would simply wander off the base, thinking the call made the ball dead (it doesn’t) and would then be picked off.

Lots of other common rules aren’t understood. People who play sports don’t necessarily have advanced understandings of the rules, and why should they? Much of the baseball rulebook is used to clarify unusual things that normally don’t happen but do need to be explained - obstruction, interference, people batting out of order, etc. It’s a lot of the “little clarifications” SmackFu refers to. There’s paragraph after paragraph on obstruction and interference and other rarely-called things, but you need those rules or else all hell will break loose when they do happen. I bet most lifetime baseball fans don’t know there’s a rule that says an infielder cannot deliberately drop a line drive in order to make a double play possible. (Rule 6.05 l.)

As a ballplayer and ump my only real beef is the infield fly rule, because it isn’t that unusual and totally screws things up when people don’t get it, but you have to have the rule. It could probably be improved, however, by changing the rule to make the ball dead, effectively preventing chaos on the basepaths.

31

No, not true. The “decisions” of FIFA on the laws of Soccer fit within my thin little lawbook. They are usually printed either on the opposite page from the law in question, or in a second column next to the law.

Even when you include the instructions from FIFA to referees (a kind of FAQ of helpful hints on law applications FIFA would like to see used), it’s still quite small.

Here is a link to a .pdf of the 2006 version of the FIFA Laws of the Game Note that the laws and the decisions together span only 30 pages. The rest of the book is filled with things like introductory crap, diagrams to help you understand Law XI (Offside) and Law XII (Fouls and Misconduct), the rules of the IFAB (the people who make the Laws), etc.

There simply is no way that Baseball’s rules condense to 30 pages of relatively large type, complete with diagrams of the field of play. :wink:

32

Rick, wouldn’t that make it the only play where the ball is dead without having left the field of play? I mean, it makes a sort of sense, but in general, the play ain’t over until the fat lady asks for time out, right?

33

There are some other cases where a ball is dead without leaving the field, such as if it strikes a baserunner in an interference situation.

34

I’m not doubting what RickJay says, but I too find it baffling that anyone could have trouble understanding the infield fly rule. I remember thinking it was a really confusing topic way back when because of what people said, and then being shocked when I actually read the rule and it wasn’t confusing at all.

35

Lots of people still haven’t actually read the rule.