Major League Baseball has a 162 game long regular season. Success is an endurance contest. It is a longer and tougher test of a team’s stamina and leadership than a football, basketball, soccer, or golf season. In baseball terms, the Republican primary season is about two weeks past the All-Star Break.
Trump is leading the delegate count at 678 out of 1,423 decided, or a won-lost percentage of .476 as of March 19, 2016. Cruz is in second place, with Kasich trailing, and Rubio sidelined.
In 2015, the best baseball team in America, the World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals had a winning percentage of .593, with a record of 101-65.
Arguably the very best baseball team of all time, the New York Yankees, has a lifetime team winning percentage, over more than a century since 1903, of .569. This is equivalent to a seasonal record, year after year, of 91-71.
These are impressive achievements. But they are not the best single season team performances. The 1927 World Champions, the New York Yankees (with a batting lineup nicknamed Murderers’ Row) had a winning percentage of .714 and 110 wins.
The best major league season record ever was the 1906 Chicago Cubs: a winning percentage of .763, and 116 victories in a 152 game season.
A great major league team wins 105 games in a single season. A very good team wins 95 games. The greatest teams of all time have a wining percentage of better than .700.
Baseball and America
In the mid-1850s, a baseball craze hit the New York metropolitan area. By 1856, local journals were referring to baseball as the “national pastime” or “national game”. A year later, sixteen area clubs formed the sport’s first governing body, the National Association of Base Ball Players. In 1858 in Corona, Queens New York, at the Fashion Race Course, the first games of baseball to charge admission took place. The games, which took place between the all stars of Brooklyn, including players from the Brooklyn Atlantics, Excelsior of Brooklyn, Putnams and Eckford of Brooklyn, and the All Stars of New York (Manhattan), including players from the New York Knickerbockers, Gothams (predecessors of the San Francisco Giants), Eagles and Empire, are commonly believed to be the first all-star baseball games. In 1863, the organization disallowed putouts made by catching a fair ball on the first bounce. Four years later, it barred participation by African Americans. The game’s commercial potential was developing: in 1869 the first fully professional baseball club, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed and went undefeated against a schedule of semipro and amateur teams. The first professional league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, lasted from 1871 to 1875; scholars dispute its status as a major league.
The origins of present day American professional baseball began with the founding of the National League in 1876, which is called rightly enough the Senior Circuit.
I grew up in New York in the 1950’s. I freely admit my strong prejudice in favor of the Yankees. Remember however, in New York we also had the Brooklyn Dodgers (left 1957), the New York Giants (left 1957), and the New York Mets (started 1962). New York City, also Trump’s hometown, was and is a baseball town.
Mickey Mantle (New York Yankees) Iconic Home Run Swing (R sided)
I listened to Mel Allen and the gang on the radio call the Yankees games (even at night in bed, when I was supposed to be asleep). I joyfully attended ballgames at Yankee Stadium three times on elementary school class trips, and saw Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Roger Maris each hit home runs live. My favorite pitcher was the crafty left-handed veteran Whitey Ford. *
Baseball has had a deep hold on the American sports imagination for more than a century:
The extent of baseball integration in American sporting habits:
As of 2007, Little League Baseball oversees more than 7,000 children’s baseball leagues with more than 2.2 million participants–2.1 million in the United States and 123,000 in other countries. Babe Ruth League teams have over 1 million participants. According to the president of the International Baseball Federation, between 300,000 and 500,000 women and girls play baseball around the world, including Little League and the introductory game of Tee Ball.
A varsity baseball team is an established part of physical education departments at most high schools and colleges in the United States. In 2008, nearly half a million high schoolers and over 35,000 collegians played on their schools’ baseball teams.
The best known American comic verse ever written is about baseball. “Casey at the Bat” was composed by Ernest Thayer in 1888. From the description in Wikipedia’s Baseball Entry:
A wry description of the failure of a star player in what would now be called a “clutch situation”, the poem became the source of vaudeville and other staged performances, audio recordings, film adaptations, and an opera, as well as a host of sequels and parodies in various media
Listen to James Earl Jones perform “Casey at the Bat”
There have been many baseball movies, including the Academy Award–winning The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and the Oscar nominees The Natural (1984) and Field of Dreams (1989). The American Film Institute’s selection of the ten best sports movies includes The Pride of the Yankees at number 3 and Bull Durham (1988) at number 5. Baseball has provided thematic material for hits on both stage—the Adler–Ross musical Damn Yankees—and record—George J. Gaskin’s “Slide, Kelly, Slide”, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson”, and John Fogerty’s “Centerfield”. The baseball-founded comedic sketch “Who’s on First”, popularized by Abbott and Costello in 1938, quickly became famous. Six decades later, Time named it the best comedy routine of the 20th century.
Watch Abbott & Costello “Who’s on First” Full Version (1953)
75 years after Bud Abbott and Lou Costello performed it on nationwide radio for the Kate Smith Show, it is still mordantly funny. Viewers may find that the fast talking con-man Abbott reminds them uncomfortably of Trump, and that Costello is simply being badgered in never ending circles by his erstwhile compatriot as Costello gets more and more riled up.
I don’t want to get tangled up in an argument about the relative merits of football and baseball. Both have their passionate advocates. America is more than big enough to love both. It comes down to this: Baseball’s appeal is largely regional, while football’s is national. More people watch football on TV, but more people play baseball.
Baseball is followed locally. Its dedicated fans go to games (often). It is also small town and rural country friendly. Baseball is deeply imbedded in America’s social fabric, its popular culture, its psyche. There is a common language of baseball idiom and symbols understood by nearly all Americans.
There are 30 professional baseball teams in the American and National Leagues. In 2015, every team drew at least 1.3 million and as many as 3.8 million paid admissions. Total big league attendance was 73.8 million fans (7th best all-time).
Baseball is statistics and comparisons. It is how we keep track of standings, savor individual and team achievements, recreate games we can’t attend, and appreciate historical context. From Wikipedia:
Organized baseball lends itself to statistics to a greater degree than many other sports. Each play is discrete and has a relatively small number of possible outcomes. In the late 19th century, a former cricket player, English-born Henry Chadwick of Brooklyn, New York, was responsible for the “development of the box score, tabular standings, the annual baseball guide, the batting average, and most of the common statistics and tables used to describe baseball. The statistical record is so central to the game’s “historical essence” that Chadwick came to be known as Father Baseball. In the 1920s, American newspapers began devoting more and more attention to baseball statistics, initiating what journalist and historian Alan Schwarz describes as a “tectonic shift in sports, as intrigue that once focused mostly on teams began to go to individual players and their statistics lines.”
It has been said repeatedly that the bedrock demographic supporting Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 is a large group of white, middle-aged, middle-class men, many of whom are fearful for their job security, and worried about their family finances. For many of them, “he is a winner” and “he tells it like it is” .
O.K. Let’s talk some baseball. We will apply the usual down-to-earth baseball metrics to analyze the current delegate count for the Republican presidential nomination.
As of March 19, 2016, Team Trump has won 678 out of 1,423 delegates decided. There are a total of 2,472 delegates in the whole regular nominating season.
Compare these real life numbers to a hypothetical regular baseball season of 162 games played out over 26 weeks.
We are in week 15 of the regular season. It is about two weeks after the All-Star break, in the beginning of August. 93 games have been played from the entire 162 game regular season schedule. There are 69 games remaining.
Team Trump is currently in first pace. They have won 44 games, more than any other team in their division. They have a won-lost percentage of .476.
Trump, as Team Manager, has been appealing to his fans, who have been none too happy with the rest of organized baseball lately. Other team managers have been making big promises about League Championships and winning performances they just don’t produce. Team payrolls are too damn high, and the veterans are dogging it on the field. Ticket prices are bloated. National TV sports announcers, especially from New York and Washington (and particularly that woman), are biased and unfair to the fans, the manager, and the entire Team Trump.
So how does today’s Team Trump record stack up? The Team has 44 victories and their winning percentage is .476, with 69 games left in the regular season. These stats are hardly something to shout about with more than half the season gone.
A great major league team wins 105 games in a single season. A very good team wins 95 games. The greatest teams of all time have a wining percentage of better than .700.
Team Trump’s record is nothing to get too excited about. They are not on pace to join the 1927 Yankees (Murderer’s Row) season in the baseball history books. Team Trump might possibly make it just above .500 by the end of the 2016 regular season, but that is hardly a shoo-in proposition based on their performance so far. To make the grade as a very good team they must win 51 out the last 69 games, a winning percentage of .739. That seems impossible. A merely good team will win about 90 games in a season. For Team Trump to get to 90 wins, they would have to have 46 victories in the next 69 games, a winning percentage of .667. Based on their current production, that seems pretty unlikely.
So they might make .500, and finish with a mediocre record. If they get very lucky and go on an absolute tear everywhere for the rest of the season, they might have a modestly good year. They will not have a very good season or a great season.
No one should be popping champagne corks, or measuring fingers for World Series rings and championship-logo baseball caps just yet.
The fact that that Team Trump competes in a generally weak division doesn’t make their record any better. The leading team from the other league that Team Trump will have to face in the World Series is off to a significantly better start than Trump.
Using exactly the same methods used above for the R League, The D League is at a little earlier point in the season, week 14. The All-Star break was just completed. The D leader, Team Clinton has played 84 games and won 55 victories, with a winning percentage of .653. They have 78 games left. Team Clinton is well out in front of Team Sanders in second place.
Worse, if Team Clinton just continues at exactly the same pace they have, they are track to win 51 more games of the 78 remaining. Total wins for the season would then be 106. The 2016 regular season for the D League leader is on pace to be a very good to possibly a great season, unless Team Clinton starts performing very badly.
So compared with Team Trump, Team Clinton has won more games (55 wins vs 44 wins), has a better winning percentage (,653 vs. .479), and has more chances left to improve the team’s record (78 games left vs. 69 games left). For all three measures, Team Clinton has an advantage, a fairly healthy one. These stats are not good news for Team Trump.
Every baseball fan can identify with this situation. They don’t need advice from any professional broadcasters, TV reporters, or sports writers to tell them how the Team is really doing.
Trump talks a great game. But really he could use some more batting practice He needs a good right handed set-up man. Finally, he lacks a smoking closer, if he wants to go all the way in October, I mean November.
With this performance record as the measure, fans are not likely to line up to approve giving Trump the multi-million dollar, multi-year managing contract extension he has lately taken to demanding as his right. A sub .500 winning percentage through the All-Star break is not Hall of Fame material.
Tens of millions of Americans are comfortable with looking behind baseball statistics. They do it for 6 months a year, year after year, many since childhood. They know what they see and how to judge it. Analyzing presidential delegate counts, made only once every four years, with a lot of arcane non-standard rules for who wins what, is not an easy job for most Americans. The rules are not familiar, and the ordinary fans don’t have a good grip on how the system behaves.
It’s hard for any regular baseball fan to be blown away by Trump’s midseason stats, translated in baseball parlance. His bedrock political supporters will figure it all out, if they use their common sense and think on the pros and cons of the deal carefully, before they choose the Republican nominee in July, and vote for real in November.
Late Breaking News:
And then there’s this fresh baseball story. On March 13, Trump tweeted all his followers the following from iconic former ballplayer, Pete Rose, who played for so many years in Cincinnati (1963-1978) before being traded to Philadelphia. This story was widely broadcast and distributed on national media on March 14th. The Ohio primary took place on March 15.
What a nice publicity boost for Trump on the eve of a critical contested primary.
Except that the story was a fake. Rose didn’t send an autographed baseball, didn’t endorse Trump, and had his lawyer state flat out that Pete Rose stays out of politics, because he knows baseball fans are right and left alike.
Rose’s attorney Ray Genco told CNN Monday there was never an endorsement.
“Pete has made a point not to ‘endorse’ any particular presidential candidate,” he said in a statement.
“He believes that who to vote for is a decision each voter should decide for him or herself,” Genco added. “Both the left and right are baseball fans — and it is those institutions and their people that make America exceptional.”
Genco also said in the statement, “Pete did not send any candidate a baseball or a note of endorsement.”
Look for yourself at the purported Pete Rose ball above tweeted by Trump compared to a real autographed Pete Rose souvenir baseball just below. Even on first glance it looks like a fake, and not a very good one.
Pressed on the issue, the ever resourceful Trump spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, clarified after the Trump fashion:
campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks pointed out that the campaign had never confirmed any endorsement, and reiterated that the candidate simply received a baseball and posted a picture of it.
Mr. Trump, really? No endorsement implied, only an innocent re-tweet, not your fault if the ball is bogus. You are not responsible yet again. Have you no shame?
Donald, I can’t go for that. Not about baseball, America’s pastime. Pete Rose played the game, Trump makes it up.
Listen to Hall and Oates I Can’t Go for That
*As a young man, I played endless hours of stickball and whiffle ball with friends against the handball court wall in the park across from my elementary school. in the summer and after class. I could name every player on the Yankees roster and quote nearly all their season and career stats. Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio were my biggest baseball heroes before Mickey and Whitey and Yogi.
I believed the 1927 Yankees (who finished 19 games ahead of Philadelphia for the pennant, and swept the World Series in four games against the Pirates) were the greatest team of all time. The 1961 season-long contest between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris to break Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record of 60 was an epic battle to this kid.
I played in Little League for two years, but I didn’t hit the baseball very well. As a left-handed pitcher however, with a Spaldeen rubber ball and a whiffle ball, I had two wicked curves and a drop screwball, which made playing and winning one-on-one pick up games very nice indeed.
On May 22, 1963, the night before my 14th birthday, Mantle smashed a home run left-handed to win a night game at Yankee stadium so hard that it hit the façade about 8-inches from the very top of the upper deck. It is the nearest anyone ever came to hitting a ball clean out of Yankee Stadium. As I got ready for school the next day, I watched the play on the morning TV shows. What a birthday present.
I had three copies of the Mantle 1957 Topps baseball card in my own medium size collection, which got larger and smaller constantly playing Flips for keeps with other kids. The cards and collection are long gone, but a vivid memory still. Baseball was important. I knew there were other great players and good teams in lots of other cities. But they weren’t Yankees. That’s just how it felt to this particular kid during the 1950’s and 1960’s, especially after the Dodgers and Giants deserted NYC for California in 1957. The Bums weren’t Yankees, but they belonged in New York.