Lockout Special: Breaking the (Unwritten) Rules

Baseball’s locked out and there isn’t much news to speak of. Let me present to you: something relevant-adjacent!

As I finished up my Economics Degree, I took a course this past spring about something called “Institutional Theory”. The base definition of what institutions are in economics comes from one of the GOAT’s, Barry Bonds Douglass North.

Naturally, when it came time to write a research paper for this course, my baseball-addled brain made some easy connections between this definition and certain parts of MLB’s ecosystem. Therefore, I was able to write a cohesive paper that started with these two sentences:

“Formal and informal institutions dictate how people act and interact in all scopes of life. The interactions between the two that cause change in each other are useful to inform attempts to make systemic changes in how people act and think.”

And ended up discussing the Astros sign-stealing scandal, the collective bargaining process, service time manipulation, and most importantly, how the Mijares-Young Incident of 2009 illustrates vicarious collective punishment.

There is some nitty-gritty Economics language in the paper, but not so much that all you fellow baseball maniacs won’t be able to understand and enjoy it. It’s a lockout and we’re content-needy, so you’ll find the paper, in full, below.