KCCCC Day 74: the seventh inning and election 42 – a comparative analysis
- Look, I’m a Red Sox fan. I ain’t jumping’ on no bandwagon. But I’d fed the dogs, the wife was out with her girlfriends, the kids were all doing homework or out, and there were turkey leftovers in the fridge. So I watched the baseball game.
- It was the most exciting baseball game I’ve ever watched. And that seventh inning – which people will be talking about until they die – was extraordinary. And it got me to thinking: that seventh inning was like this election campaign. And what good is a political analysis without some clichéd sports analogies, right? So here we go.
- The length of it, for starters. The Jays-Rangers inning went for almost an hour, around 53 minutes. This election campaign has dragged on for just about 80 days, which is basically two-and-half elections in one. The average length of a major league baseball game inning is maybe 20 minutes, rule changes notwithstanding. So last night’s seventh inning was, like the election, a hum-dinger.
- The game’s low point. The deciding Jays-Rangers game reached its nadir – if you’re a Jays fan – when Toronto catcher Russell Martin threw the ball back to the pitcher – and it deflected off Shin-Soo Choo’s bat. That, according to a bizarre MLB rule no one had ever heard of, meant the ball was in play – and the Rangers’ Rougned Odor was allowed to score the tie-breaker. The assembled Jay’s fans went nuts, with some idiots throwing full beer cans onto the field (and each other) – and delaying the game. The Jays filed an official protest, but the run counted.
- The election’s low point? Well, for me, it was the niqab. The Conservatives and the Bloc weren’t breaking any official rules when they raised the issue – they had the right to do so, I guess. But they shouldn’t have done so. It brought out the worst in many people (like the Jays fans), and it was an ugly way to get ahead (like the Texas Rangers). That said, it inspired a bit of heroism – in particular, Messrs. Mulcair and Trudeau saying they disagreed, and at their own peril in their home province of Quebec, too. The Jays got past the ugliness, and so did the politicians who spoke up for tolerance. In the end, it didn’t hurt Trudeau electorally, and it helped Mulcair reputationally – I, for one, will always admire the NDP leader’s guts.
- Lotsa errors. The Jays won, sure. But if Jays fans are being honest with themselves, as they nurse hangovers this morning, they’ll admit the Rangers largely handed the game to them, with a trio of bizarre errors in the seventh – dropped balls, missed balls, and balls going awry. That set the stage for Jose Bautista to send a rocket into left-centre field – a three-run homer that put the Jays ahead 6-3. (I’m in the minority, but I didn’t like his little bat flip – he was entitled to do it, like Justin Trudeau musing yesterday about a majority, but it was potentially dangerous.) And that was the game, pretty much.
- All of the teams competing in Election 42, however, had errors. Not just one. All of them offered up the saddest gaggle of candidates anyone can remember – truthers, anti-Semites, racists, stalkers, haters, Hitler comparisons and even a guy who peed in a cup when he thought no one was looking. It was pretty pathetic. It was a disgrace. And they did it to themselves, too. Unforced social media errors, right across the board.
- The big hit. Joey Bats, natch. He propelled the ball into the parking lot, and it will keep rolling through Toronto’s consciousness for years to come. But all of us in Toronto – if we are again honest with ourselves – never expected it. We expected to do what Toronto teams always do, which is choke. Similarly, the Liberals. After they squandered their pre-playoffs high, we (or at least I) expected them to continue to do badly when it counted, during the election. But Trudeau swung true – during the debates, mainly, after that CPC ad had lowered expectations about him to the sub-basement – and he connected. The ad that pulled him down also made him soar. Similarly Bautista – the Hellish seventh inning pissed him off, and he turned it into a win.
- Anyway, the foregoing is taking politics and sports comparisons to an absurd level, I know. But Election 42 will always remind me of inning seven – the length of both, the low points that became high points, the errors, the big dramatic play. That’s just me, of course, readying to retire KCCCC until Election 43 happens (or until the Lord takes me home to the field of dreams, whichever comes first). What do you think, gentle baseball/politics fan?
- Oh, and in case you don’t think politics and baseball aren’t inextricably linked – the Jays are playing the Royals on Election Day! Can you imagine Major League Baseball doing this on a U.S. Election Day?
