Dispatch from the Sports Bar: What Losing Sounds Like
This post is about baseball, not presidential politics.
I started recording the above audio in my local sports bar on October 30, 2024, just as the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series. It probably helps to listen to it before reading the piece below.
I did not see the man who shouted, “fuck New York,” moments before the Dodgers won the 2024 World Series, but whoever he was, he was standing near the only Yankees fan in the bar.
It didn’t take a doctorate to figure out he was the only Yankees fan in the bar. We were in West Los Angeles. Everyone but him and I were decked out in Dodger blue. He had on a Yankee cap and a black leather jacket with the Yankee logo emblazoned on its chest. He was also bald, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had a Yankee tattoo on the crown of his skull.
I’ll never understand why this Yankee fan chose to watch the game in the bar that night. What did he expect? His team to win when they were down three games to one?
It might hurt for him to consider, but the Yankees were never going to win the World Series. It was plain as day that the 2024 Harris-Walz ticket and its staff New York Yankees were a fundamentally unsound presidential campaign baseball team.
The Yankees had no coherent game plan or theory of baseball. They just came out and said, “we are The Yankees. We are going to win. You will hold your nose and cheer for us because we are Not The Dodgers and YOU ARE ARE GOING TO LIKE IT!”
But banking on your opponent being unlikeable is not a winning strategy in baseball. In fact, that has nothing to do with baseball at all. Baseball is about scoring runs. You score runs by getting runners on base and then bringing them to the polling center—I mean homeplate—and you get runners on base by swinging at pitches and getting hits.
However, rather than looking for hits, the Yankees deliberately chose not to take any swings. They would not swing for contact. They would not swing for power. They would not swing on an economic agenda or at a vision for a better tomorrow. They played as if they would always get walked to first base and to second, third, and eventually all the way to home because the Dodgers were incapable of doing anything but beaning voters. I mean batters.
The Yankees were able to get runners on base, but they did not score anywhere near enough points to win. They left too many independents and leftists on base for reasons too annoying and frustrating for me to enumerate here. If they wanted to win baseball games, they would have understood you cannot leave batters on base. You have to take swings and offer people something. You aren’t going to get walked every time you step up to the plate. Runs aren’t going to score themselves no matter how much you are Not The Dodgers.
Sure, in a reasonable world, premising your entire strategy around being Not The Dodgers would be very compelling on its own. There’s no denying the Dodgers have low favorability ratings. They have many fans, but they’ve generally been brainwashed by a lifetime of exposure to Dodger and Dodger-adjacent propaganda. No independently thinking person loves the Dodgers. They are indisputably one of the least liked teams in all of baseball.
But people don’t like the Yankees either. Every component of the team—ownership, management, the roster—is despised by everyone who isn’t already a Yankees fan. They are viewed as arrogant, as the team of the establishment. The “progress is slow but we will reach a better tomorrow” attitude of the Obama era eased the disdain for a while, but it’s been replaced by a dismissive scoff that sounds a lot like “what do you people want from me?”
Take the New York Yankees position on the economy. The team likes to say their statistics here are good, but their whole argument is suspect. They like to point to wage gains for low earners, but those gains only bump a $22,000 annual salary up to like $24,0001 and that doesn’t begin to make a dent in the high costs of basic needs like housing and health insurance. Everybody can see this is a infield pop fly but the Yankees insist it’s a triple. Neutral fans see through it every time, and the Yankees get mad at them for having the gall to use their eyes and ears.
The real problem is structural inequity and an overreliance on the private sector to accomplish things better placed in the hands of the public sector, as evidenced by how baseball is played in every other developed country on the planet, but the Yankees refuse to address these problems in any credible way. Their insistence on owning and defending an indefensible status quo and their refusal to take chances on any major changes just enables people to view them as a void, and that void inevitably gets filled with whatever cultural and social grievances they feel the owners of the status quo are responsible for.
The Dodgers understand this. The Dodgers take swings. They are stupid and morally bankrupt swings, but they are swings. And if you swing enough you will eventually hit a pitch.
Yes, in a reasonable world, the Dodgers would have struck out every at bat and the New York Yankees would have won the World Series. But we do not live in a reasonable world. We live in the world of baseball, a world that is Capital-I Insane. There is no salary cap. Rules are enforced sporadically by a group of unaccountable uniformed men. Baseball fields don’t even have to be any particular size; teams get to decide when they’re building the stadium whatever the dimensions are going to be. And, like any other sport, there are styles of play that work in one era that don’t translate to another.
If the Yankees ever want to win the World Series, they have to understand that this is the sport they’re playing. Not football. Not basketball. Not hockey. Not golf. Baseball.
It is a game with serious flaws. It is a game that is not fair. But getting mad at the game for not being a different game won’t make it a different game.
If the Yankees want to win, they have to accept the conditions they’re operating under and adjust accordingly. They have to change their playbook. If the roster doesn’t understand how to operate the new scheme, the team has to dump the roster and build a new one. If the coaching staff doesn’t understand how to teach the new scheme, they have to go out and find a coaching staff that does. If donors ownership is not comfortable with this new direction, they need to suck it up and meet the moment.
What the Yankees can’t do is cling to the old way of doing business and let the roster and coaching staff fill up with expensive veterans who are long, long past their prime. If they do that—if they insist on doing that—they will lose. They will lose often. They will lose big.
Somehow there are Democratic journalists, columnists and podcasters New York Yankees beat reporters who go on MSNBC ESPN and whatnot and say that the scheme, the coaching, and the roster are all fine, actually. What the team needs to do next season is pivot to the center (they already did that). What the team needs to do is give up on woke stuff (they also already did that). What the team needs to do is not swing (as if there is any harder somebody can not swing a baseball bat).
These pundits are not worth taking seriously. They’re offering neither a serious analysis nor a practical solution. They’re clearly not watching the games closely, if they’re even watching them at all. When I see these pundits on TV or in the newspaper, all I see are toddlers in propeller caps insisting that you, me, and everyone else treat them like they’re the only adults in the room.
The only thing they are is evidence that people at every level of the New York Yankees baseball club—the donors ownership, operatives coaching staff, the roster of politicians players, and even some of the fans—want to double down on a failed playbook because that’s the only scheme they know how to run. They know if a team changes its scheme, the team might have to bring in a new coaching staff. The roster might need to be turned over. They might not get to keep their jobs. Either that or they’re more loyal to their scheme than they are to winning baseball games.
Whatever the case, people who are afraid to step up to the plate and go down swinging shouldn’t be part of the New York Yankees baseball organization in the first place. This is the baseball team of the New Deal and the Great Society and the New Frontier and Yes We Can. This is the baseball team that chose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
It is not the party that chose to stay on Earth and tell everybody, “um, no, actually, we’re not gonna go to the moon. Stop saying we’re going to the moon. Going to the moon is unrealistic.”
Some New York Yankees might be mad at me for saying this, but it’s pointless to yell at me, a casual Detroit Tigers fan who doesn’t even like baseball that much, for not cheering loudly enough for the New York Yankees. It doesn’t accomplish anything. It is a waste of time.
The New York Yankees have been wagging their fingers at people like me for three election cycles seasons now, and there’s no evidence it helps them. You can’t just scold runners for being insufficiently moral, cultured, and well read in your eyes and then expect them to like you. That is not how baseball is played. That is not how it was ever played. That is not how it will ever be played.
I don’t write this to insult or demean Yankees fans. I was once a Yankees fan. I remain sympathetic to the Yankees. I would vastly prefer to live in a universe where the Democrats Yankees won the World Series and not Donald Trump the Los Angeles Dodgers.
But if the Yankees want to do that, then they will have to buck up and play the game. They will have to swing at some pitches. Not every swing will be a home run, but not every swing has to be. They will have to accept they cannot ignore a hittable pitch that’s on the left side of the strike zone. That isn’t how you win baseball games and that isn’t how you build a better tomorrow.
I don’t know what the Los Angeles Dodgers are going to do as World Series Champions, but I do know that the New York Yankees need to get off the mat, adjust to reality, and stop crying. Because, in the immortal words of Tom Hanks, “there is no crying in politics.”
I know that I’ve just dragged out a quote about politics in a post about baseball, but I’m sure you’d agrees that politics can serve as a good if strained and uneven metaphor for baseball. And if this post wasn’t already around 2,000 words, I would expound upon that thought.
I’m making these numbers up because this is a satirical sports blog read by like 5 people. The point still stands and also my numbers are not far off from the truth.