Baseball and American political dysfunction

I forget which French intellectual said that anyone who wants to understand America needs to understand baseball. This is probably an exaggeration, but while staring at this box score and then this financial data it occurred to me that the reason we have such a dysfunctional political system can be traced to the same factors that have preserved the nonsensical way pitchers are credited with “wins.”

In 1876 National League pitchers completed 91% of their starts. Under the circumstances, a rule which credited the pitcher who was pitching when his team took a lead it didn’t subsequently surrender with the “win” made good sense. In 2011 NL pitchers completed slightly less than 3% of their starts. This guarantees that in a large minority of games the pitcher who is credited with the “win” bears little or no relation to the pitcher who did the most to help his team achieve it.

In theory this problem could be fixed quite easily — just give the official scorer the discretion to award the win to whichever pitcher deserves it most. But we can’t do that. Why? Because of the Framers. The Framers wanted political gridlock and they also wanted to take dictatorial discretion out of the hands of official scorers, who, if they could award wins to anonymous middle relievers they particularly liked, would soon be sending the rest of us to FEMA “re-education” camps. It’s a slippery slope.