“All the men in baseball understood the code,” Barber recalled later. “A code is harder to break than an actual law. A law is impersonal. Often a man breaks a law, is clever enough to get away with it, and people think he is a smart fellow. But when you break an unwritten law, a code of conduct, you are damned, castigated, banished from the club so to speak. You are a renegade, a scoundrel, an ingrate, a pariah.”
If you've ever broken an unwritten rule, this quote hits hard.
