It’s Election Day. It’s the seventh game of the World Series and your team is still alive.
Anyone who follows baseball knows that there are many similarities between following baseball and following a political election. There is the same immersion in the day-to-day fluctuations of fortune, the same shifting balance of hope and fear, the same sudden resolution on one final day. There is the same invitation to the infinite pleasures of geekhood: the romance of numbers, the memories of earlier epic battles, the friendly community of like-minded geeks. The major difference between a political election and a baseball season is that a baseball season is much, much shorter.
Well, there’s also the fact that politics is about something real and baseball isn’t. Just kidding. Just kidding.
But, well, you know, this is part of it. I mean really. The best thing about baseball is that it feels so real, you make it so real, but it isn’t real. If the Phillies win the World Championships, you can ignore them. It can even add interest to what will happen next year. If the Mets have lost again, you can comfort yourself with the thought that rooting for a baseball team is all about hope, love, and loyalty. The pain of the loss is very real. But you know that pain is part of the package. You chose the pain, in order to have the hope of the pleasure. This makes baseball pain subtly, but significantly different from unhappiness. As a baseball fan, I’ve lost a lot more than I’ve won. But I am still happy to be a baseball fan.
As a voter in presidential elections, I’ve also lost more than I’ve won. But there’s no way I have enjoyed it. There’s no way I can see it as part of the fun of following political elections. The pain comes and it stays. It can’t be sentimentalized. It is unhappiness. If you’re a grown-up human being, you can’t be comforted. Except by triumph.
