New plurality rules for baseball!
The extra-innings format rule in Major League Baseball has inspired me to dust off a format change I’d blogged about years ago, but which so far hasn’t garnered the changes I envisioned. Be assured, I have forwarded this “innings-ovation” proposal to Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred. Incredibly, then-commissioner Bud Selig did not respond to my original proposal.
The Electoral College is as American as baseball—venerably, willfully idiosyncratic, hidebound and capricious. (Which is part of the fun, right?)!
Why does the similarity stop there?
The enduring use of the Electoral College should inspire those of us who love the game–as we love the Republic–to greater depths. If winner-take-all is indeed our national spirit, why must “America’s game” cling to its outmoded scoring?
Total number of runs over nine innings is clearly too simple-minded a way of determining a winner. And likely to stir up passions.
Therefore, in order to address the unfair, and frankly un-American scoring discrepancy that baseball presents, I would like to modestly propose a new set of plurality rules for scoring a baseball game:
- The team who scores the most runs in a particular inning will be awarded ALL of the runs scored in that inning by either team.
To illustrate: let us say, in the first inning Team ‘A’ scored 3 runs and Team ‘B’ scored 2. Under electoral scoring, Team ‘A’ having received more runs that ‘B’ would receive all 5 runs scored in that inning.
Then, (to continue the scenario) if in the following second inning, ‘B’ scored 3 runs and ‘A’ none, the running score would be ‘A’-5 vs. ‘B’- 3, each having won an inning and been awarded all the points that inning carried. Then, in the 9th inning, the innings-won total would be calculated to determine the winner.
I’m sure we can all agree that this makes much more sense. And to those who say it would unfairly award wins and even the championship to a lesser team, I can only say that it wouldn’t happen any more frequently than the Electoral College winner loses the popular vote (5, but who’s counting?).
Indeed, a survey of the last two World Series contests shows that while the scoring would have been different, the result would have been the same. And more just.
But I hear you say, there could still be a tie.
Of course. In the new innings plurality rules, the teams would play a 10th inning. But, as the new player-in-scoring-position-to begin extra innings makes clear, to continue playing past that is pointless. If, at the end of the 10th inning, there is still a tie, the decision as to who has won the contest would be remanded to a responsible body, one with knowledge of the teams, players and their capabilities.
There could be no better group than living members of the Baseball Hall of Fame to weigh, consider and decide which team should win, a College of Baseball Elders. Like the electoral college, there could be some simple safeguards in place, such as a restriction on not voting for a team on which an Elder had previously played.
What could be more American?
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For a primer of past blog posts on the issues surrounding the Electoral College, click the links below: everything from the issues surrounding popular vote winners losing in the Electoral College, to Faithless Electors, to the democratic deficit inherent in the apportioning of EC votes.
And for a thrilling read, check out the whole series, beginning with Faithless Elector.
Alexander Hamilton and the first contested election
Power of Small State Voting
Chaos Theory, Electoral College Style
Faithless Electors could have tipped 5 previous elections
Structural Flaws
James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector , Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.
His work, “Numbers Don’t Lie” also recently appeared in the 2020 short-story anthology Low Down Dirty Vote, vol. 2, and his short story “Ultimatum Games” will appear in Rock and a Hard Place this fall. His next book, w/t Bastard Verdict, is a noir political thriller set in Scotland.
A Seattle native (mostly), James now lives in South Philadelphia with his wife and three children. He’s a member of the The Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, Int’l Thriller Writers, Philadelphia Dramatists Center and is the newly elected vice-president of the Delaware Valley chapter of the Sisters in Crime network. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle.
Chosen Words - James McCrone 