Yes It Is, It’s True: Baseball has taught us political lessons

Baseball has has taught me interesting lessons about politics:

• That a democratic system, the will of the people, can err badly in judgment, especially when people are ignorant, don’t pay attention, are easily misled or too infatuated with celebrities.
• That the electoral college may not be as bad a system for choosing a president as so many of us believe who favor instead the popular vote.
• That the free market system easily can create a horribly unfair economic pyramid in which only a very few make really huge bucks and unwary working stiffs are condemned to fight for the crumbs.

Plato, in “The Republic,” dismissed democracy as simply mob rule, suggesting that people can be flattered and swayed by silver-tongued tyrants. Add the modern power of marketing and advertising, which thrives on exploiting customers’ personal weaknesses to get them to make poor decisions against their own interests.

Major League Baseball in the early 1970s discarded the effective system of having players and managers choose All-Star Game starters every year with the stipulation they couldn’t vote for themselves or teammates. This peer-elected system fostered a great sense of pride for players selected, but it was replaced by the fans voting, which turned it all into a popularity contest, too often determining All-Stars by who was best known.

Fans in 1989 elected Philadelphia Phillies’ third sacker Mike Schmidt, even though he had retired on Memorial Day weekend. Fans in other years too often elected famous players like Reggie Jackson who were hitting .182 and suffering through terrible seasons.

Even worse, teams got into the act by deliberately telling fans to vote early and often for their favorite local team players, regardless of whether they were deserving or not. So players in big market cities were more likely to be chosen.

Lesson No. 2, using the playoffs and World Series, baseball declaries the winner on the basis of who wins the most games, best of five or best of seven, in a series. It does not insist the winner is the team that scored the most runs combined for all the games played.

A team that wins four games to three easily could have scored fewer runs in the seven games than its opponent. The electoral college is similar in that it awards all electoral votes to the winner of each state, but the eventual winner could lose the overall popular vote, like George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.

This doesn’t mean I endorse the electoral college as the way to have a president elected, but it does help me raise valid questions about the conventional wisdom of the popular vote. I just don’t see how the candidate with 65 million and one votes should prevail over the one who had only 65 million.

Lesson No. 3 will incur the wrath of Ranger Rick and Free Market Man. Though I agree ballplayers probably were underpaid back in the Dark Ages, before Curt Flood shook the baseball world in 1969 by refusing to play for the Phillies after being traded by the Cardinals. Players afterward began to have more control of their lives with the advent of free agency and free market principles, and salaries soared as a result. Each player could seek out his best deal, the most money.

The great Al Kaline was paid $100,000 a year in 1974, then among the top salaries in the game. Today, that’s less than the bare minimum. Players such as Prince Fielder were handed a multi-year contract worth more than $200 million, and don’t even get me started on A-Rod.

The free market system liberated players from their shackles on the plantation, as suggested by Flood. But it also liberated them to the point they are among the richest individuals in the nation, perhaps eclipsed only by the even more elite team owners, bloated corporate CEOs who pay their salaries and own the stadiums, partially funded by taxpayers’ dollars.

Many fans are extremely critical of how much their heroes are paid to play a boys’ game, but there’s nothing that can be done about it when the owners are willing pay and the fans continue to show up at the ball park and pay outrageous prices for food, drink, parking and souvenirs. Our collective stupidity is being exploited, just as Plato warned.

I want to thank baseball for opening my eyes to these unpleasant realities. I don’t show up at corporately named Comerica Park, but I do watch Tiger games on TV. And when all those insulting commercials appear, I mute them. I’d like to think I’m not part of the problem of being easily misled.

I don’t remember who said it, but someone once wrote that in a democratic system, the people eventually and willingly will vote away all their freedoms. Most recently, documentarian Adam Curtis posited that politicians no longer are able or willing to solve our problems.

Baseball teaches us that we’re in deep doo-doo.