My hometown minor league baseball team, the Fort Wayne TinCaps, has a bad habit of taking called third strikes. For the baseball agnostics out there, this means the batter doesn’t swing at a pitch and strikes out by doing nothing. It is extremely frustrating to the fans in the stands. I can only guess the reaction of the coaching staff.
The other night, the TinCaps were rallying in the ninth inning from a 5-0 deficit. Two runs had scored, two more runners were on base and the potentially tying run was at bat with two outs. The batter absolutely had to put the ball in play but instead, he looked at a third strike.
While I am no baseball genius, it doesn’t take one to know that the batter’s decision was the worst one he could have made. And this team seems to do that all too often. One game last year with a similar ninth-inning rally in progress, the batter looked at three straight strikes for the third out. He never lifted the bat off his shoulder.
I am certainly not suggesting I could do better. My early baseball career ended when my new pair of bifocals made it difficult for me to figure out which of the two balls coming at me I should hit. I certainly never had to face fastballs headed toward me at 90-plus miles per hour. I would need to start my swing the day before for any chance to catch up to those.
So other than being extremely frustrating for a true fan like me, what does this have to do with real life? My perspective on life is that all can be explained by baseball metaphors. I took a lot of philosophy courses in college so I am allowed to think these grand thoughts. Except for maybe that Plato guy, I consider Yogi Berra to be the greatest philosopher in human history. Yankees haters may want to stop reading now.
It will not surprise my family and friends that I have reduced the 2024 presidential election to a called third-strike situation. That’s the only way I can make sense of it.
Kamala Harris apparently has resolved not to swing at any pitches thrown by a mostly friendly media. Her strategy, and it may yet prove a winning one, is to let an accommodating media on the mound ineffectively miss the plate with their softball pitches. Ball four and she takes first base without trying.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is swinging wildly at every pitch thrown by a mostly antagonistic media. He doesn’t care how far off the plate the media pitch is, he swings at it. My philosopher hero Yogi was renowned for hitting bad pitches, very bad ones. Donald Trump is not Yogi Berra.
Kamala Harris is at the other extreme. Has she been asked any pertinent questions by our supposedly nonpartisan media? She has reason to be confident … at least for now … since most of the national media have been lackadaisical if not completely somnolent when addressing her political record. Recall that the New York Times labeled her a “pragmatic moderate” when Joe Biden selected her as his running mate. This was the same Kamala Harris who scored 100 the previous year on the liberal Americans for Democratic Action spectrum, the same score as self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders.
Back to baseball and my admittedly strained analogy. Neither type of batter, the swing at everything one or the swing at nothing one, helps his team. He is only good for aggravating the fans, even the die-hard ones like me. Does that sound like the current presidential election?
Maybe not so much, as both candidates have their fan base that is quite accomplished at selective rationalization of their candidate’s verbal faux pas. Most of us, sometimes myself included, tend to look first at who said it before considering what was said. One of the joys in my dotage is to watch when the majority party changes and the new minority immediately opposes policy positions they supported when they had all the power. Just look back a decade or two for a quick rehearsal of the two parties’ attitudes about Supreme Court independence.
Perhaps I have pushed the baseball metaphor too far. But maybe not. Consider this: You can bet on any baseball game with the odds changing as the game progresses. You can do exactly the same thing with the presidential election. Contemporary American culture has reduced everything to betting odds.
The major difference is that there will be another baseball game tomorrow when you can try to make good your gambling losses. With the presidential election you are stuck for four years.
Bet wisely.
Mark Franke, M.B.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice-chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
