Cheering for baseball teams and presidential candidates

Who to root for? Fans have complicated decisions to make when our favorite baseball teams and presidential candidates are out of the running.

Here’s my baseball preference guide: 1. Boston Red Sox (others may substitute their hometown teams). 2. Detroit Tigers (my team-in-law) or any team playing against the New York Yankees. 3. A team that has not won a World Series within the past 70 years. 4. The team with the best record during the regular season, since that should count for something 5. All other teams.

(Why 70 years? Cleveland has not won a World Series for 76 years, since 1948, and Psalm 90 teaches that “the years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty.” Few fans are strong enough to wait for more than seventy years.) 

What about presidential candidates? The Family Research Council’s “2024 Presidential Voter Guide” lists positions on 13 policy issues. Four of them—same-sex marriage, transgender competition in sports, taxpayer-funded gender transition, teaching children sexual topics—relate to sex. Donald Trump beats Kamela Harris on all four and the other nine, including a sleeper issue: “Chinese purchases of American farmland.” (Trump opposes them and the Harris position is “unknown.”)

The FRC list did not note policies on the Russia-Ukraine and Hamas-Israel wars. Most important, it did not even mention questions of character. I tend to think in quadrants, so in deciding who to vote for I have a vertical line labeled “policy issues” (higher is better) and a horizontal line labeled “character” (further right is better; I’m not using “right” politically). I hope for candidates in the upper right quadrant.

This year in baseball, I’m for the Los Angeles Dodgers (4) against the New York Mets (5), and for Cleveland (2 and 3) against the Yankees. I have a similar ranking system in politics, but it’s complicated to explain except for one element: hypothetically, the worst presidential candidate is a narcissist surrounded by fawning assistants.

A friend of mine in New York said (during a humorous conversation) that next month he will write in Grover Cleveland, the New York governor elected in 1884 and again in 1892. I blurted then that on my Texas ballot I’d write in Sam Houston (1793-1863). After all, the Constitution says a candidate has to be at least 35, a natural-born citizen, and a U.S. resident for at least 14 years, but it doesn’t say the candidate needs to be alive.

Houston has a big downside: He owned slaves. Slightly mitigating: Like George Washington, he didn’t like slavery, sought a way out, and was relatively humane amid the inhumane evil. But in this dystopian year lowlighted by a movie entitled Civil War, Houston’s fierce 1860-1861 opposition to the US Civil War impresses me. As an elderly Texas governor he traveled the Lone Star State predicting “fields of blood… scenes of horror… mighty cities in smoke and ruins…  brother murdering brother.”

Houston survived an assassination attempt. A Texas state convention voted 168-8 to secede. The Texas legislature removed Houston from the governorship. Houston said, “The glory of my life was that I had the moral manhood on that occasion to stand up against the influences which surrounded me, and to be honest in the worst of times.”

###