Politics is the Mind-Killer: An Essay on the Nature of Fandom

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

In the time of the Roman Empire, civic life was divided between the Blue and Green factions. The Blues and the Greens murdered each other in single combats, in ambushes, in group battles, in riots. Procopius said of the warring factions: “So there grows up in them against their fellow men a hostility which has no cause, and at no time does it cease or disappear, for it gives place neither to the ties of marriage nor of relationship nor of friendship, and the case is the same even though those who differ with respect to these colors be brothers or any other kin.” Edward Gibbon wrote: “The support of a faction became necessary to every candidate for civil or ecclesiastical honors.”

Who were the Blues and the Greens? They were sports fans – the partisans of the blue and green chariot-racing teams.

~Eliezer Yudkowsky, A Fable of Science and Politics

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved baseball.  Strangely, in America, when you say you love baseball, or football, or basketball, that doesn’t mean you love playing the game, of course, but that you are a passionate fan and spectator of the sport you love.  I do enjoy playing baseball, although I haven’t actually played hardball in at least a decade.  (One issue that people talk about a lot is how fewer native-born Americans are playing baseball, and making it to the major leagues.  I wonder how much the fact that softball, and not hardball, is the recreational version of the sport, impacts this.  Parents sensibly are more concerned about their kids getting hurt, so kids don’t play with a hardball unless they are in Little League.  Everything else is softball.)  But I’m a Major League Baseball fan.  I can enjoy watching any part of any baseball game.  I’ve been known to become audibly excited when a pitcher throws a great series of pitches, or when a hitter has an at-bat where they keep fouling away pitch after pitch of the pitcher’s best stuff.  I can name the top ten minor league prospects for all thirty teams.

Lots of people are baseball fans.  But a lot of baseball fans, including me, take it further.  Some play fantasy baseball.  But others of us follow the path that Bill James blazed.  James was a night watchman at the Stokely Van Camp pork and beans factory, who was obsessively interested in baseball.  In 1977, he self-published the first issue of the Bill James Baseball Abstract, 80 pages of mimeographed studies of obscure statistics, such as which combinations of pitchers and catchers gave up the most stolen bases.  In short order, the Society for American Baseball Research and the science of sabermetrics was born.

Anyone who is or knows a sports fan knows that fans are often filled with opinions on how their team should be run.  This player should be traded.  This player should be used more.  What sabermetrics is about is figuring out how to quantify those opinions.  What is the best batting order that you team should use, really?  Who is the better, rather than the luckier, pitcher?  Is Derek Jeter really a “clutch” player who performs better when the game is on the line?

James and many others in the sabermetric community discovered a lot of deep insights about baseball, which were verifiably true.  Things like the value of on-base percentage over batting average, or more accurate ways of measuring fielding prowess, or Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS), a more accurate way of measuring the value of a pitcher.  But the baseball establishment wasn’t interested.  Professional baseball is an insular world.  Professional ballplayers are managed by former professional baseball players, are scouted by former professional baseball players, and run by former professional baseball players.  Former professional baseball players even compose the bulk of the announcers and commentators of professional baseball games.  Their decisions are evaluated mainly by an insular community of professional baseball writers, who are such an institutional part of baseball that they have sole authority of who gets elected to the baseball Hall of Fame.

And they weren’t interested in having their views challenged by the night watchman of a pork and beans factory, or those of Voros McCracken, a paralegal in his late twenties living with his parents.  They were professionals, men who had lived baseball their whole lives, and weren’t interested in a bunch of fans who were trying to figure out why their teams weren’t winning.  It took a failed first round pick, Billy Beane, getting handed one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, and deciding to implement the knowledge that James and McCracken and so many others discovered.  And even when a best-selling book about James, SABR, and Beane’s success with the A’s was published, much of baseball still resisted and resists the wisdom of fans who cannot stop thinking about what is really going on at a baseball diamond.  Indeed, “Moneyball” is so loathed by the baseball establishment that Hall of Famer and ESPN announcer Joe Morgan derides it almost weekly, while loudly proclaiming that he hasn’t read it and never will.

There are now thousands of people just like me, baseball nerds who are illogically interested in events over which we have no control, who are seeking out the same nuggets of truth about the game of baseball.  One website I visit nearly daily is The Hardball Times.  A recent article there profiled Gavin Floyd, a former top pitching prospect who has suddenly emerged with a breakout year for the Chicago White Sox.  In that post is a graph, measuring the verticle and horizontal movement of all five of Floyd’s pitches this season.

At this point, the very pertinent question is what is the point of my knowing the graphical representation of the movement of Gavin Floyd’s pitches.  Not because it can’t help me know why Floyd is a successful pitcher, or whether he is likely to continue to have that kind of success.  But because what can I do with that knowledge?  I’m not a White Sox fan.  I’m not in the front office of a baseball team trying to sign Gavin Floyd to a contract, or evaluate the future of another pitcher who is like Floyd.  I don’t even play fantasy baseball.  My awareness of Gavin Floyd’s ability can’t win me so much as $10 in an office pool.  But I’m still interested.  I still care.

One of my most memorable experiences as a baseball fan was in 1996.  My team, the Baltimore Orioles, had just had one of the best seasons in their history.  They were matched up against their bitter rivals, the New York Yankees, in game one of the playoffs.  The Orioles led the Yankees 4-3 in the bottom of the 8th inning, when Derek Jeter hit a long fly ball to right.  Outfielder Tony Tarasco was poised to catch the ball, when a twelve-year old kid named Jeffrey Maier reached out to catch the ball and deflected it into the stands.  The play was called a home run, tying the game, which the Yankees went on to win in the 11th inning.  The Yankees went on to win the World Series.

Anything can happen.  After spending over $200 million in salaries and playing 162 games of baseball that season, the fate of the Orioles and Yankees was determined by the actions of a middle school kid who wasn’t trying to do anything of consequence at all.  But, as interesting of a truth as that is, that wasn’t the most interesting thing to me about the event.

What I found most interesting is that in New York, Jeffrey Maier was a hero.  Rudy Giuliani gave him the key to the city.  Yankees fans didn’t care about how they won.  They didn’t care that a miscall on fan interference was the reason they won the game, or that their victory could be construed as “tainted”.  They won, and however it happened, the fans wanted the Yankees to win.  It doesn’t matter how it happened.  None of the Florida Marlins’ fans in 2003 felt guilty when Steve Bartman stole a foul ball from Moises Alou to cost the Cubs a trip to the World Series.  Who cares if the Cubs hadn’t had a series win in 95 years in Miami anyways?  There is no crying in baseball.  Winning is what counts; it is what we pay our money to hopefully see.

Strangely, for as much as I love baseball, I don’t participate in the fan voting for the All-Star Game.  It isn’t because I don’t have opinions, sometimes strong ones, about which players should make the All-Star Game.  I didn’t even vote this year, when Baltimore’s Brian Roberts was one of the final vote-in All-Star candidates (he lost to Tampa Bay’s Evan Longoria).  Roberts clearly deserved to make the All-Star team, having the third-best Value Over Replacement Player (one of those fancy statistics that I was telling you about) of all second basemen in baseball, and the twentieth highest of all hitters.  It says a lot to me about baseball when the fans, the players (who also select part of the All-Star rosters) and the manager of the Boston Red Sox all fail to make the player who statistics show to have been the 20th most valuable player this season one of the 70 All-Stars of the league.  But it also says a lot about the way voting works.  There was no point in my voting for Roberts, even though I was allowed to vote as many times as I liked.  The reality always was that more popular players from larger markets were certain to get more committed voters.  And that the outcome of whoever was elected as the final player to the All-Star team didn’t make any meaningful difference worth the effort.

One of the most famous articles that made the reputation of Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt was called Why Vote?  In it, Levitt presents the findings of a study on the value of any one vote:

The odds that your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, very, very slim. This was documented by the economists Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter, who analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years – a 1910 race in Buffalo – was decided by a single vote.

The article goes on to observe that empirical study shows that when voting is made easier and more convenient, voting actually decreases:

The Swiss love to vote – on parliamentary elections, on plebiscites, on whatever may arise. But voter participation had begun to slip over the years (maybe they stopped handing out live pigs there too), so a new option was introduced: the mail-in ballot. Whereas each voter in the U.S. must register, that isn’t the case in Switzerland. Every eligible Swiss citizen began to automatically receive a ballot in the mail, which could then be completed and returned by mail.

From a social scientist’s perspective, there was beauty in the setup of this postal voting scheme: because it was introduced in different cantons (the 26 statelike districts that make up Switzerland) in different years, it allowed for a sophisticated measurement of its effects over time.

Never again would any Swiss voter have to tromp to the polls during a rainstorm; the cost of casting a ballot had been lowered significantly. An economic model would therefore predict voter turnout to increase substantially. Is that what happened?

Not at all. In fact, voter turnout often decreased, especially in smaller cantons and in the smaller communities within cantons. This finding may have serious implications for advocates of Internet voting – which, it has long been argued, would make voting easier and therefore increase turnout. But the Swiss model indicates that the exact opposite might hold true.

The conclusion of the study of vote-by-mail in Switzerland was that people vote to conform to social norms of what was expected of good citizens.  Think of the purple fingers in Iraq, or the “I Voted” stickers that people like my mom, a poll judge in Maryland, hand out for when you show up at the polls.  Think of P. Diddy and “Vote or Die”.

Why are such strong social norms needed to persuade people to vote?  The franchise is a right which millions of people have killed and died for, after all.  What could be a greater testament to its worth?  Economics professor Bryan Caplan of GMU, author of the book The Myth of the Rational Voter, offers an explanation:

[I]t isn’t worth my while to spend time and energy acquiring information about candidates and issues, because my vote can’t change the outcome. I would not buy a car or a house without doing due diligence, because I pay a price if I make the wrong choice. But if I had voted for the candidate I did not prefer in every Presidential election since I began voting, it would have made no difference to me (or to anyone else). It would have made no difference if I had not voted at all. This doesn’t mean that I won’t vote, or that, when I do vote, I won’t care about the outcome. It only means that I have no incentive to learn more about the candidates or the issues, because the price of my ignorance is essentially zero. According to this economic model, people aren’t ignorant about politics because they’re stupid; they’re ignorant because they’re rational. If everyone doesn’t vote, then the system doesn’t work. But if I don’t vote, the system works just fine. So I find more productive ways to spend my time.

So, here’s the thing.  I, and a lot of other people, love baseball.  Americans love baseball enough that all thirty teams across the country will have over one million people attend games – over 40 million tickets sold each year.  And nearly all of us go further than that.  Millions more watch the games on television, listen to them on the radio, buy hats and jerseys of our favorite teams and players.  In 2007, over 23 million votes were cast for the All-Star game.  But with all that interest, the All-Star roster results haven’t improved much, if at all.  Derek Jeter, having the worst season of his career, still won the fan balloting for shortstops, with 3,747,437 votes.  And while a few major leage teams have imitated the Oakland A’s and hired sabermetricians, most notably the Red Sox who employ James and used to employ McCracken, mostly, baseball teams continue to ignore the information generated by sabermetrics.  Two of the top contenders in all of baseball are the two teams with the lowest payroll, the Florida Marlins and the Tampa Bay Rays.  The team with the highest payroll, the New York Yankees, are almost certain to miss the playoffs.  All the data in the world and the encouragement of baseball’s “citizens” (the fans), have not done much to make baseball teams make better decisions.  If, of course, you assume that the goal of baseball teams is to win games (and to do so for a reasonable cost).

Then again, the actual goals of professional baseball teams is somewhat debatable.  The most famous example of constant futility is the Chicago Cubs.  This year marks the 100 year anniversary of the last World Series victory by the Cubs.  Over those years, the Cubs have fielded some of baseball’s worst-ever teams.  And it has been widely theorized that the reason why the Cubs have been so bad for so long is because the Cubs are so popular.  Their ballpark, Wrigley Field, is one of baseball’s best.  They have enjoyed nearly constant sellouts for the past 99 years.  And so the Cubs have largely lacked an incentive to make better decisions.  Whether the club succeeds or fails, its fans will continue to love and patronize the team.  The Cubs are currently for sale, and will be sold for a record price for a professional sports franchise, possibly to billionaire Mark Cuban.  And over the past 99 years, the Cubs have enjoyed passionate fans even though there is a major league baseball alternative just on the other side of town, the White Sox.  

Brian Roberts, the aforementioned 20th most valuable hitter in baseball, was one of many baseball players named in the Mitchell Report.  Roberts admitted to the press that he did use steriods, claiming to have done so once in 2003 and that it was a terrible decision.  That Roberts admitted to having cheated at baseball didn’t, of course, result in his being prohibited from playing.  Indeed, other players named in the Mitchell Report are also still active and many, such as Jason Giambi, Jack Cust,  Miguel Tejada, and Rick Ankiel are stars.  Tejada was an All-Star this season.  Andy Pettite, Jose Guillen, and Eric Gagne were all named in the report and signed to new multi-million dollar contracts in the same offseason.  The only two players named in the report who have faced consequences from the game and from fans are the greatest hitter and pitcher of their generation, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens.  

Baseball has a rich tradition of cheating.  Players like Hall of Famer Gaylord Perry and Dodgers All-Star Preacher Roe were both notorious and admitted spitball pitchers, an illegal altering of the baseball before it is thrown.  One of the most famous moments in baseball history, the Shot Heard Round the World, was aided by a coach observing the opposing catcher with a telescope, and signaling to the batter the sign for what pitch was coming.  So, it isn’t that surprising that baseball’s establishment and fans were easily able to forgive players like Roberts, Giambi, and Pettite who admitted their cheating, albeit only after getting caught.  Bonds and Clemens are punished not for their cheating, but for refusing to admit it even as the evidence of it becomes insurmountable.  It isn’t the crime, but the cover-up.

What does all this information about baseball tell us?  It tells us that a lot of people care deeply about baseball.  It tells us that this love of baseball surpasses rational attachment.  It tells us that, whatever reason people have for becoming a fan of a particular team, they will generally remain a fan of that team, whether the team is or isn’t successful.  It tells us that fans of teams want their team to succeed regardless of the method which leads to their success.  It tells us that fans won’t even turn on players who are known cheaters, unless they are bald enough that they are caught at it.  It tells us that there is a subset of baseball fans who care so passionately about the game that they will invest time, effort, and serious intellectual resources into improving the game, and who will form grassroots organizations to help disseminate that information.    It tells us that there is a power structure of the game which actively inhibits the incorporation of outside knowledge into the game.  It tells us that no matter how much resistance or how futile these grassroots efforts are, they will persist and indeed grow.  And it tells us that even when the fans are given a voice regarding which players are rewarded for their performance, they will vote irrationally and in large numbers based on their sentiments and prejudices rather than on informed opinion.

By now, the parallels between professional baseball and American politics ought to be clear.  What I believe is that we are not part of an informed citizenry in a participatory democracy, but that we, and politically inclined Americans in general, are politics fans.  There is little difference between a Vote Obama bumper sticker and a Mets t-shirt.  The reason why the Daily Kos exists is the exact same reason why Markos is the co-founder of another successful website, SportsBlogs Nation.  Fans of anything are still fans.  They will gather by the thousands online to argue about their teams prospects and strategies but root for their victory regardless.

I’m not one for grand unified theories, but this one is something I can no longer deny.  This is what we are: politics fans.  Netroots Nation might as well be a Sci-Fi convention; you meet other fans, have seminars where people talk about the details of policies like they are episodes of Star Trek, you get to shake hands with some of your favorite stars of the ongoing reality series.  A handful of us will go on to be hired by major league franchises; Joe Trippi and Jerome Armstrong in the role of Bill James.  But mostly, all the letters we write to our congressmen are the equivalent of calling sports talk radio to demand that our team use Joba Chamberlin as a starter instead of a reliever, or saying that we ought to trade for Johan Santana.  The teams will do what they do, regardless of what we think they ought to do, or even what we can prove they should do with our hard work of crunching the data and arguing our points.

More disturbingly, we aren’t fans of our particular favorite team for much reason at all.  A landmark study on the variance of beliefs of identical twins published in 2001 demonstrated that:

[Y]our differing attitudes on abortion, birth control, immigrants, gender roles, and race are mostly due to your genes, while your attitudes toward education, capitalism and punishment are due to your life experiences.

This means, generally speaking, that you aren’t a liberal or a conservative or a libertarian or a socialist by either choice or by reason.  Our political passions are, psychologically speaking, about as random as what sports team we favor.  You are a Yankee fan because you happen to have been born in New York, or because your parents are, or some even less explainable coincidence.  I’m an Orioles fan for no better reason than because they were the team who was on television and who I could easily go see when I was growing up.

But it has more frightening implications as well.  It means that there isn’t a meaningful probability that I, or you, or anyone can persuade others to change their heritable beliefs.  All the passionate treastises about why abortion is or isn’t murder, or whether or not immigration is good for America and should be encouraged, are as pointless as my efforts to understand graphs of the horizontal and vertical movement of Gavin Floyd’s curveball.  The open-minded voter is largely a myth.  What we are doing is either preaching to the choir about how great the Red Sox are, or banging our heads against the wall trying to convince Yankee fans that they should become Red Sox fans.

The title of this long missive is borrowed from this post by the aforementioned Eliezer Yudkowsky.  In it, he writes:

People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation… When, today, you get into an argument about whether “we” ought to raise the minimum wage, you’re executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival!

Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back – providing aid and comfort to the enemy. People who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there’s a Blue or Green position on an issue.

It is hard to admit, but I’ve been badly mistaken about the nature of things, and what I was trying to do in it.  I’ve been an Orioles fan in a world of Red Sox and Yankees fans.  Libertarians cannot win the American League, of course, any more than the Orioles can hope to have Brian Roberts elected President.  We’re spoilers; we can determine the outcome only by beating them in a contest which is meaningless to us, but which will affect the relative position in the standings of the contenders.  I have no hope of convincing anyone here to change their basic political attitudes; roughly the same amount of hope that I have of convincing my friends here in New York to root for the Orioles against the Yankees.  I’ve written here before of my desire to start a sabermetrics movement in politics; grassroots activists who will figure out how the game really works and how teams could play it better.  But that has nothing at all to do with any of my beliefs becoming policy, or anything in reality getting better at all.  What will come of it is more or less what has come of the “netroots” to date: the teams which take advantage of the new and better methods which we come up with will be able to better optimize their income.  A few of the smartest fans, who are the most hard-working and insightful, will be able to make a decent living doing so, because other fans like me will pay to read about the sport we love.  Ron Paul and Barack Obama will be able to out-fundraise their competition, much like the Oakland A’s out-draft the other 29 teams.    Even so, luck and randomness will result in many of the best-run teams being perennial also-rans.  Billy Beane may run a franchise which gets more wins per dollar spent than any other, but they have yet to even reach the World Series.

The problem I have with baseball is that, no matter what, the fans end up getting screwed.  Ticket prices keep going up.  Hot dogs cost $6 now; a crappy domestic beer is $9.  Sports teams worth hundreds of millions of dollars, owned by multimillionaires shake down taxpayers for publicly funded stadiums, where taxpayers like me cannot even dream of affording a decent seat.  Television broadcasts use CGI to put advertisements right behind the hitter.  Everyone cheats as much as they can get away with.

Yet, I can’t stop loving baseball.  I know it doesn’t make sense.  I know that I could be spending my time and money much more wisely, doing things which will actually improve my own life and the lives of others.  But I love the game.  I’m a fan.

It isn’t the same for me with politics anymore.  The costs are too high.  Instead of $9 for a beer, it is trillions of dollars for pointless and corrupt wars.  Instead of overpriced hot dogs, I get cops who beat down bicyclists and shoot the Mayor’s dogs.  And I’ve lived long enough to know that in politics, what really matters to nearly everyone is not that we get better government, but that the Yankees or Red Sox win.  Eighteen guys running around on a field throwing and hitting a ball in particular ways for obscure reasons is pretty silly.  The politics game, well, that is just offensive.  And I don’t see a reason to keep watching such an awful game.