In baseball, the strike zone
is defined as that area over homeplate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.
Major League Baseball, Rule 2.00.
Baseball’s strike zone illustrates the tension between objective and subjective standards of evaluation. This tension is also common to the legal concept of the “reasonable person.”
The “reasonable person” is a recurring legal concept—an important yardstick for assessing human behavior. A person is “negligent” if they exert less care than a reasonable person in the circumstances would have. The standard is not precise. Behavior is evaluated objectively. Some conduct falls below the standard of a reasonable person no matter. In baseball, a pitch off the edge of the plate as always a ball. But behavior is also evaluated subjectively. The circumstances of a person may inform whether or not they behaved reasonably. Likewise, a shoulder-high ball for one batter is a chest-high strike for another.
Complicating the situation is the presence of a third-party tasked with applying the standard. Conduct is not fed into a computer, evaluated on a range of data points, and decreed absolutely reasonable or unreasonable. The strike zone is not enforced by robots. A jury evaluates conduct in the courtroom, and the umpire evaluates pitches in the ballpark. Different umpires might call a pitch a strike in one at bat, and a ball in the next. One jury might find conduct unreasonable today, but the same conduct might be reasonable sometime in the future.
Maybe this inconsistency is a weakness in baseball, and in our legal system. Or maybe the unpredictable boundaries of the strike zone and the reasonable person provide the flexibility necessary for the system to survive. Total objectivity is unduly harsh, total subjectivity too forgiving. Tension between the two drives baseball, and the law.
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