Major League Baseball’s recent wave of warnings about uniform violations—to Mike Clevinger and Ben Zobrist about their cleats, and to Willson Contreras about his personalized sleeve—don’t feel like they’re meant to protect specific policies; it feels more like they’re meant to protect an idea. That idea is one of what belongs in baseball and what doesn’t, and where individual personalities and concepts of fun might fit in there, and it’s all very old; it’s the sort of thing that feels so fundamental as to be embedded in the very structure of the game.
But, of course, there are specific policies behind these violations, and rather than being natural pieces of baseball’s foundation, they’re carefully crafted through years of negotiation, as the MLBPA recently reminded everyone.