It happened 115 years ago last month. In their first official American League game, the Detroit Tigers faced off against the Milwaukee Brewers, finding themselves down by nine runs late in the game.
On that historic afternoon, April 25, 1901, in front of 10,000 fans, the Tigers entered the ninth inning trailing Milwaukee, 13-4. A series of hits and miscues followed, moving the score to 13-12 with two runners on. With two out, Tiger Frank "Pop" Dillon faced reliever Bert Husting, and the lefthanded hitter rapped a two-run double to complete a 14-13 comeback win.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen often. “In 73 seasons studied by Retrosheet president David Smith, just 213 teams came back from a deficit of four runs after eight innings. That’s out of 44,537 attempts, or a success rate of under 0.5%.”
Now of course, presidential nomination contests aren’t baseball. And while there have been some upset victories early on in the nominating processes, 1901-Tigers-style, against-all-odds comebacks haven’t happened before. I fully recognize these and other shortcomings of this sports analogy, but it nevertheless serves the point I’d like to make with this diary.
In many contexts in which the outcome doesn’t matter, we play to the finish. Fans aren’t ushered out of the stadium just because the outcome of the game appears to be certain. That’s true even in contests where the outcome is, in fact, certain. When a football team is down by five touchdowns with two minutes left in the game, diehard fans will still wildly cheer a spectacular play by their team, even though that team is certain to lose the game. We don’t expect those fans suddenly to give up their ardent support for the team they love, especially not as the reality of a disheartening loss is still sinking in.
And I know what many of you are thinking: football is the better sports analogy because there just isn’t enough time or enough pledged delegates left for a historic Bernie Sanders upset. Then again, that all depends on the definition of “win.”
Unlike sporting events, in which our heroes play until the clock runs out or until the final out, the outcome of a presidential nominating contest does matter. At the Democratic Convention in late July, the Party will not only formally select a nominee, it will write a party platform. I want Bernie to have as strong a hand as possible in that process, and I think it’s eminently reasonable for him and his supporters to believe he will have more leverage in the process if he doesn’t leave the field before the primaries are over. Bernie should forge on until the last vote is counted, and both the Democratic nominee and platform will be the better for it.
And one last point. Despite its flaws and the fact that it breaks down like all analogies do, I think the baseball analogy is still more fitting than a football analogy. As Democrats in my home state of Missouri know only too well, events can tragically overtake a seemingly certain win — or, as happened here twice, an actual win. Fate has robbed Missourians of two Democratic Senate candidates: first in 1976, when U.S. Representative Jerry Litton was killed in an election night plane crash before polls closed in a Senate primary contest that he won, and again in 2000, when Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan was killed in a plane crash three weeks before he posthumously won his Senate race against Republican John Ashcroft. Now let me be perfectly clear: although I’m a Bernie fan, and I was long before many of his current supporters even knew his name, I certainly do not wish a tragedy of any kind to befall Hillary. I not only expect she will be the Democratic nominee, I also expect and hope that if she is, she’ll go on to trounce Trump in November. But truth is stranger than fiction, and unforeseen events could still result in a Sanders nomination, despite how improbable such an outcome seems at the moment. Don’t forget that also at this moment, it’s not mathematically impossible for Bernie to win a majority of delegates; it is, admittedly, extremely unlikely.
So while I’m a realist about the probable outcome of the Democratic contest, let’s not shush anyone or try to usher anyone out of the stadium until the contest is over. Let’s do what we do even when it doesn’t matter: play to win, play to the end, and enthusiastically cheer on our heroes until the clock finally, officially runs out.
P.S. To supporters on both sides. One thing we should all adopt from the sports world is good sportsmanship. These meta wars are tiresome and pointless. I know I might as well be scolding a drunk fan at the stadium, but it’s important to continue saying important things even when you know that a lot of people will ignore you.