Baseball and Democratic Politics: Teams Win Games and then Play Again.

Replay the game over a beer and give credit where credit is due. Hold the trophy for a set period of time and return to play again. A model for democratic politics.

Baseball is a partisan sport. To fully enjoy the game, you need to have a “home” team. You need to care about the action. To be a fan. To identify with “your side.”

Then the excitement of the game is the fine balance between winning and losing for every at bat, in any inning. The final outcome always in doubt. A lead turns into a tie and then a deficit and back to a lead.

As far as we know, all cultures have had “games.” I’ll let experts debate whether or not individual contests or team contests dominated in specific civilizations. I’d like to think that gladiatorial combat was popular primarily in hierarchically arranged, authoritarian cultures. And team sports in democracies, societies where power was more horizontally distributed.

Take baseball particularly as an example. The more you examine the game, the more it becomes a team sport, in spite of all the individual plays. The pull-backs from the abyss, approaches to the lead, loses of a sure thing, and the game deciding outcome hanging on a particular pitch, all are experienced, felt, and seen as a team event.

So is partisan politics in a stable democracy. When FDR compared himself to a player on the Democratic Party team (trying to hit a home run for the team) he captured the moment, and the spirit of an era.

And it seems to me you find for both, fundamentally backgrounding competition, an idea, or perhaps an ideal, called “sportsmanship.”

Individual contests can lead to death or life-threatening injury. There is a raw “tooth, nail and blood” ferocity lurking in the background. In a team sport, in contrast, there is great respect for the other side. Their players make great plays; they have grit and spirit. In a sense, sportsmanship is another name for our support of the game itself, for fairness in competition, the legitimacy of an “other side,” the joy of playing the game. In fact, the underlying sense that it is “a game.”

In a mature democratic system, the central truth is “we will play again.” Unless there is a guaranteed “next time” there is no democracy. It is not just that the immediate game is open ended, that the scoreboard has blank spaces for further scores. It is that even when a game ends, we are only deciding the moment. We will accept the final score, except it is not a final score.

“You guys are the winner for now and we’ll let you celebrate your victory. Maybe even join you for a beer. But don’t ever think it’s over. Leave the bases on the field, the balls in a bag and the bats in the rack.”

What we are seeing in much of the world today, is winning candidates in “democratic” elections violating this trust—claiming to have won for good, changing the rules once in office, limiting the freedom of the press, jailing opponents, using the power of the State against rivals. And the ultimate betrayal, claiming they won when they didn’t.

In baseball the winning team takes, and should take, pride in winning according to the rules, being “better” on a level playing field. Out thinking, out hustling and getting the close call (umpires are only human and luck plays for both teams). That’s called winning a game or an election. And as in a baseball, after an election it is acknowledged that for the moment you were better able to play the “game.”

This is what electoral politics looks like in a country where mature teams of skilled players battle each other. And maybe down that beer afterward together in a neutral bar. There is an underlying “we are all fundamentally on the same team” spirit in democratic politics as in baseball (in the same league, playing the same sport, needing each other or there wouldn’t be a game—or an America). It is that underlying loyalty to the “game” that allows us to compete for a temporary and partial triumph, rather than a total final victory. For there will always be a next game, next series, or next year.

In a mature democracy we can win or lose and return to a good life. We settle some important issues, not forever, until the next election, and we allow the victors to carry out their program, to try some new ideas, to show us what may have been the weakness of our own agenda for a trial period—until the next election.

I don’t mean to imply that elections are back-yard volleyball where we let the kids play, or don’t try to play. We play hard and intend to win. But when we don’t agree upon the nature (the meaning) of winning, then democratic governments can become totalitarian.

Back to the beginning of this blog. I think it is the fine balance between winning and losing in a game like baseball, and the underlying spirit of sportsmanship, that legitimizes the temporary and limited nature of victory. We hold the trophy for a while. We know we could have lost. We came so close to losing and our victory seemed in part miraculous. We do not deserve, we must not think we own, a final victory. We have fought, struggled, sacrificed, slid past a tag at home. We have given our all. Another game in a long history of games, another season in a long history of seasons. It is not over. We do not want it to be over.

The next game is already scheduled, and we are planning to win.

And prepared to lose.