Yes It Is, It’s True: Baseball defends electoral college

Townbroadcast has been inundated lately with opinions about the electoral college method of selecting the American president, thanks to a column by the venerable Army Bob.

Column author Robert M. Traxler has ignited some interesting arguments in the comments section of this on-line rag because he doesn’t hold truck with those who believe a straight popular vote should be used to choose our president. Traxler even summons the thinking of our Founding Fathers in making his assertions.

Indeed, the Great Compromise in the history of the U.S. Constitution involved combining the Virginia Plan for the most populous states with the New Jersey Plan for more sparsely populated states. Some of those who met for the convention in 1787 feared large and populous states would unfairly dominate elections.

The Virginia Plan established legislative districts based on population. The New Jersey Plan created the same with each state having an equal number of representatives — two. The Founding Fathers decided to have both by having two legislative chambers, the House and the Senate.

Since then, there have been four instances in which the president elected had fewer votes nationwide than his opponent. Interestingly, in all cases, it was a Republican winning over a Democrat: Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden in 1876, Benjamin Harrison over Grover Cleveland in 1892, George W. Bush over Albert Gore in 2000 and Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

So Army Bob seems to note it’s those liberal Dems who are calling for scrapping the electoral college. Because of it, they’ve lost four times while winning the popular vote.

I am also very reluctant to do away with the electoral college, but for very different reasons than Army Bob. My reasons are based in baseball, particularly the 1960 World Series.

The New York Yankees that year scored 55 runs in the seven-game series, more than twice the total of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who plated 27. Yet Pittsburgh was crowned world champion in dramatic fashion in the ninth inning of the final game on a walk-off home run by Pirates’ second baseman Bill Mazeroski.

Pittsburgh claimed the title because it won four of the seven games. Nobody contested it. The Pirates’ four victories all were close while the Yanks won by wide margins in their three victories. New York scored more runs in the first three games than Pittsburgh did in the seven games of the series.

So the Pirates were declared the winner, without any fanfare, by the same process as were Hayes, Harrison. Dubya Bush and Trump. Insisting the series be decided by total runs would be the same as insisting on popular vote totals deciding the presidential election.

I remain uncomfortable with a simple popular vote total as the vehicle for choosing our president. Candidate A gets 65 million votes and Candidate B gets 65 million plus one and therefore is the winner. So a very sizable minority is disenfranchised by such a small margin because of the winner-take-all philosophy for each state and nationwide.

The task at hand is to find a better and fairer path to the presidency. I’ve yet to see a better plan than what we already have, but I am very open to discussions about alternatives. Perhaps we need to see if somebody indeed has built a better mousetrap.

COVER PHOTO: Pirates’ second baseman Bill Mazeroski rounds third base after hitting his dramatic series-winning walk-off homer.