Titans to clash -- and there's a debate, too - Strib's Nick Coleman

[question everything]

Nick Coleman
Star Tribune
Published October 8, 2004

America is baseball and apple pie. There is nothing in there about multitasking. But tonight, Minnesota's TV clickers will be smoking and we will be multitasking like a woman on a cell phone painting her nails and balancing a latte on her lap while hurtling down Interstate Hwy. 394.

Baseball or politics, Koskie or Kerry, George or Derek? Who's on first? The Twins vs. the Yankees in Game 3 of a series that will send the winner to the American League Championship Series and maybe the World Series? Or Round 2 between President Bush and his Democratic rival, John Kerry? There are only 25 days until the election but even fewer (23) until the final game of the World Series might be played. When you live in a battleground state and your baseball team is in the hunt, the national pastime is smack up against the nation's future and there could be brawls in living rooms and barrooms all over the state.

(snip)

Since 1920, the American League has won 14 championships in presidential election years, and Republicans won the White House in nine of them. That's a .640 batting average for the GOP in American League years. The only Republicans who won without an American League triumph in hand were Ronald Reagan (1980, Philadelphia defeated Kansas City) and George H. W. Bush (1988, the Dodgers beat Oakland.)

Democrats do even better if the National League wins in an election year, batting .714. The problem for the Dems has been that the National League has won only seven election-year championships since 1920 -- half as many as the American Leaguers. (Bill Clinton is the only Democrat since Harry Truman to have bucked the trend, winning in two American League years, 1992 and 1996.)

The most recent harmonic convergence between the American League and the Republicans was in 2000, when the Yankees beat the Mets in the "Subway Series" and the younger Bush beat Al Gore. Well, Bush didn't actually beat Gore, not in the popular vote, anyway. But let's not get into that now.


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Nick Coleman is at [e-mail].