The Nationals Are Not The Mets

OK, indulge me a bit. This will be about baseball, and this will be about politics. Which means that I will probably lose some of my normal readers.

I am willing to bet that, in this vast nation stretching from sea to shining sea, there are some people asking themselves right now “What’s a Met?”

Well, the World Series has just ended - a remarkable and exciting World Series - in which the underdog Washington Nationals defeated the favored Houston Astros in a final game seven, in Houston’s home park.

Politics comes because, pundits are fond of saying, a lot of people don’t take politics seriously until the baseball season ends.

Well, there were a lot of little things that made many of our sports pundits think the Astros would win. They burned through their division while the Nationals barely made the playoffs, they rolled over the mighty New York Yankees in a division series while the Nationals struggled tooth and nail to get there.

And playing four games in their home park gave the Astros two advantages. They knew the quirks of their field - and every ball field is a little different - and they got to use a pinch hitter four times.

So what happened? Washington won two games in Houston, then Houston won three games in Washington. Then the World Series moved back to Houston, where the home team lost the last two games.

There is a lesson here. In order to decide who has the best team - or the best political candidate - you actually have to play the game.

That’s one of the things that makes the Democratic Presidential debates so interesting. You see a dozen or so candidates - all saying they don’t have enough time, many saying the rules make it too hard to get on stage - all explaining why they should get to run for President in an admittedly imperfect forum. All true, but guess what? The smart ones modify their positions, they all calculate just how much to attack and how much to appeal to the supporters of the people they are running against.

And the polls give us a running update on how well they are doing, while the pundits try to explain the unexplainable. After all, there is no good and secret answer to how to win this big, ungainly clash.

But, they are playing the game. And, some invisible hand of public opinion (thank you, Adam Smith), will somehow elevate just one of them to the status of Democratic candidate for President.

Meanwhile, on the other side, nothing really changes. Trump is good. Trump is wonderful. Trump is being picked on. Democrats are unfair to Trump. He knows how to fix the economy, and bring our troops home, and make our nation safe from the Mexican drug-dealing bad people.

Static. In both meanings of the word. Just the same noise over and over again - call it talking points, if you want to make inertia sound sophisticated - which changes nothing and only wins over the people who are already won over.

And there are numerous polls showing how well President Trump would fare in the next election. A lot show it could be close, but those are national polls, and don’t look too deeply at a lot of things. For example, when was the last time you saw a poll that showed how well the President would do based on electoral votes, rather than the popular vote?

Now, let’s go back to baseball. 

The New York Metropolitan Baseball Club - that’s the name originally chosen in 1961 for the franchise we now call the New York Mets - won the World Series twice in magical, wonderful years. Mostly, however, they have been a team that swings from hopeful to woeful.

(I don’t know the history of the original New York Metropolitans, which played in New York City from 1880 to 1887. I know they did not have a World Series back then.)

Now the polls show that there will be a real, contested race between Donald Trump and whoever runs against him. And he is hovering around 45 or 50 per-cent.

But what does that mean? Well, here it is.

The Washington Nationals won 93 games in the regular season and lost 69. The New York Mets, who are in the same division, won 86 games and lost 76, falling seven games behind. That was very respectable compared to the Marlins, who sat at the bottom of the division with a record of 57 wins and 105 losses.

They were 40 games behind the division leader.

Now the people with an eye for detail and a love of arithmetic will notice that the numbers don’t seem to add up. That’s because the division leader was the Atlanta Braves, who won 97 games and lost 65 - four games better than the Nationals.

Then there was a wild card playoff and a division series and all the rest of the wonderful things that happen in baseball. And, of course, the Nationals won.

It shows something that everyone running for President should take to heart. You have to play the game.