THE RULES OF THE GAME:

If We Treated Baseball Like Our Presidential Election

It’s easy to roll your eyes and shake your head at the refusal to accept reality by Donald Trump and the Republicans. They continue to litigate as I write this on December 18, and Trump continues to say that Biden lost and lost badly.

Any sane, thinking person knows that Biden did not lose badly, and did not lose at all. He won the election by more than 7 million votes; but, since we use the deeply flawed Electoral College, that doesn’t matter. Biden won that, too, 306 electoral votes to 232, the same margin by which Trump defeated Clinton in 2016.

Trump, of course, disputes everything he doesn’t like. He has urged courts to throw out election results, hand him wins in states he lost, and disqualify the votes of millions—anything to change the results of the game he lost. He doesn’t care about rules or facts; he just crows that the election was stolen, that Biden will be an illegitimate president, that Trump votes weren’t counted, that Democrats used their deep-state network to flip Trump votes to Biden, and other unfounded, wishful-thinking claims.

And he does so without one shred of evidence, and plenty of evidence against him—much to the ongoing bewilderment of election officials, opposition lawyers, and judges everywhere. That doesn’t matter to Trump supporters; they believe whatever he says. The day the Electoral College met, Trump “electors” showed up in states that Biden won demanding to cast their electoral votes to be counted when Trump is declared the real winner. They literally just plain made up the concept of “an alternate slate of electors” despite the rules of our election game not allowing for that. One group actually sent forged certifications of electoral votes to places like the United States Senate, perhaps hoping Mike Pence would count theirs.

Whether Trump believes any of this, he’s stoking fear, anger, and distrust, and inciting dangerously unstable people to commit violence and foment civil war. This matters a great deal. Those people live in a false reality they’re desperate to believe, and they want to change the results of the game to make that delusion real. And Trump has pushed them to do so—pushed them to ignore the rules of the game.

But the rules of the game matter. We play any game by agreed-upon rules, whether it’s chess, Yahtzee, poker, Scrabble, horseshoes, Monopoly, or baseball. We don’t try to change them after the fact when we lose, no matter how disappointed we are. To do otherwise is to behave like a spoiled child who throws a tantrum to get his own way.

Play Ball!

Let’s consider if we played baseball the way Trump & Company are playing the election game.

The National Red Elephants are hosting the American Blue Donkeys for Game Seven of the Worldly Series. It’s a close game full of exciting plays, and the fans love it—well, the Elephants fans, anyway. It’s going badly for the Donkeys, who start the ninth inning down 9-3. They need six runs just to tie it and not have their season end in the ultimate loss.

But in the top of the ninth, the Donkeys have an explosive inning against the Elephants pitching staff. The Elephants send seven pitchers out, but they just keep giving up hits. The Donkeys tie it up before hitting a go-ahead grand slam. At the inning's end, the Donkeys have scored ten runs and lead 13-9. The Elephants have to come up with four runs in the bottom of the ninth just to send the game into extra innings.

The Donkeys bring in their star closer, who strikes out the first two batters swinging. The Elephants’ last hope is their big slugger, who is hitting .460 in the postseason with 14 home runs. It’s a long at-bat, with great pitches repeatedly fouled off. The count hangs at 3-2 for twelve straight pitches—but finally it happens: The Donkeys pitcher leaves a fastball out over the plate, and the Elephants slugger unloads, sending a towering shot to deep left field, and it looks like a homer.

Except it isn’t. The left fielder goes all the way to the warning track and makes a tremendous leaping catch to snatch the ball from over the fence and rob the slugger of the home run. The game ends: Blue Donkeys 13, Red Elephants 9. The Donkeys have won the Worldly Series.

But the Elephants manager runs onto the field to protest to the crew chief. The umpire comes over to hear the protest. The fans assume that the manager is claiming interference, such as the slugger’s bat hitting the catcher’s glove as he swung, or a fan reaching over the fence and touching the home-run ball—all things that the replays clearly show didn’t happen. But fortunately one of the broadcast networks has miked the manager, so we hear him arguing that the closing pitcher is using steroids and must be ejected—and the game replayed from the beginning of the inning! There’s no evidence of steroid use, the umpire explains, and at any rate the manager should have complained before the inning began.

The manager demands that the umpiring crew assemble to discuss his protest. But when they do, he adds a new complaint: Several Donkeys players were using corked bats, including the one who hit the grand slam in the top of the ninth! And the starting pitcher used Vaseline from his cap brim to grease the ball across five innings!

The umpires agree that the manager should have argued any of these allegations at the time; it’s too late to even consider them now. As the Elephants manager throws a fit, the Blue Donkeys manager comes out to investigate. Silly as it is, to settle things he gets his players to bring out all their bats and has his pitcher come out with his cap. The umpires find no corked bats and no hint of Vaseline. The game is still over; the Blue Donkeys still won according to the rules, and the Red Elephants still lost.

Appealing to a Higher Authority

The furious manager claims that he is playing the game under protest and appeals to the commissioner of Supreme League Baseball. The world can’t believe that this is happening; no one has ever refused to accept an obvious Worldly Series victory based on wild claims without evidence. The commissioner finds that there were no corked bats and no Vaseline pitches, that the manager should have argued those things earlier in the game anyway, and that you can’t retroactively protest a game that’s already over. The game is in the books.

The manager still won’t accept it. The game, he claims, was rigged. The umpires conspired with the Blue Donkeys to steal the game. Even the commissioner is complicit! By now, many of the Red Elephants fans who were in the stands and watching on TV are angrily supporting their team’s manager. If he says these things happened, they must have happened. The Red Elephants organization believes its manager as well, and publicly backs him on his wild, unsubstantiated claims.

The manager adds a new twist. The grand slam in the ninth, he says, was off one of the corked bats that mysteriously disappeared when the umpires inspected the Donkeys’ bats, so therefore the grand slam should be disqualified. That makes the game tied at nine going into the bottom of the ninth. And if you then disqualify the Donkeys’ closing pitcher for steroid use, the only logical thing to do is decree that the Elephants slugger’s almost-homer is really a homer and change the results. The final score, he says, should be 10-9, with the Red Elephants the Worldly Series champions.

It sounds ridiculous in every way, but rabid Elephants fans are falling in line. They talk about the manager’s claims as if they’re facts, and that everyone is deeply involved in this conspiracy to deny the Elephants their earned victory. After all, why would the manager make such outlandish claims if they weren’t true? And since they’re true, creating new rules after the fact to disqualify a grand slam and a pitcher and call a caught ball a game-winning home run only makes sense to rectify this egregious wrong perpetrated on Red Elephants fans everywhere!

The manager appeals to the broadcasters to provide footage of the game, since they had close-ups of everything. Countless video clips of the Blue Donkeys’ starting pitcher clearly shows no Vaseline on his cap or his fingers. Footage of the players and their bats allowed easy comparison to the bats the umpires investigated that day; no corked bats were used. This should finally settle things.

Bring on the Fear Tactics!

But no. The manager renews his claims that the Blue Donkeys’ pitcher was on steroids, and he demands a blood test. This, he says, will convince everyone of the truth, and the game will have to be replayed from the bottom of the ninth (changing, yet again, what the manager says must be done to be “fair”). The pitcher volunteers to be tested for anabolic steroids, and of course he’s clean.

No, he isn’t, the manager says. He’s LOADED with steroids, and the entirety of Supreme League Baseball is lying to protect the Blue Donkeys—the umpires, the commissioner, and even the medical personnel who conducted the steroid test—just as they lied about corked bats and Vaseline. It’s an unfathomable conspiracy! By now, many Elephants fans are rabid about this miscarriage of baseball justice and demand that Game Seven of the Worldly Series be played over in its entirety. It’s the Worldly Series, after all—it’s far too important to NOT do this!

But not all the Elephants fans. Many have accepted that the Blue Donkeys have won the Worldly Series. Some think it’s obvious. Others think that there probably were steroids and Vaseline and corked bats, but it’s time to move on. Even the Red Elephants organization has finally begun to distance itself from its manager. In the wake of virtually every sports reporter saying that it’s clear that the Blue Donkeys won the Worldly Series, the team’s executives quietly begin agreeing. Even people on the Red Elephants’ favorite network, Pachyderm Sports, which caters exclusively to Red Elephants fans, says the Blue Donkeys are the champions. A few of their notoriously delusional sportscasters still scream that the Worldly Series was stolen, but the few with journalistic integrity are tired of this ridiculous charade.

The manager says there’s still a chance to undo this before the start of the next season—even though there’s nothing in the baseball rules or in the rules of how the SLB conducts its season to allow for that. And every Red Elephants fan has to do everything to change it—or else Blue Donkeys fans will change everything about baseball and ruin the sport forever! They’ll institute the Designated Pitcher! They’ll change the base distance from 90 to 80 feet and add a fifth base! They’ll legalize steroids! They’ll let women and gays play! They’ll make an inning four outs, an out five strikes, and a walk six balls! They’ll allow backward baserunning! They’ll change beer and hot dogs to wine coolers and tofu! They’ll make free tickets available to poor people and Band-Aids available to stadium-goers with lacerations! American tradition will collapse!

His fear-mongering works. Incidents of violence by Elephants fans upon Donkeys fans escalate. Vigilante Elephants fans go to the commissioner’s office and declare that the Red Elephants actually won, and they want him to accept their claim and change the record. One Red Elephant fan runs a Donkeys fan off the road and holds him at gunpoint, convinced the man has proof in his car of the conspiracy to cheat the Elephants out of the win; there’s no evidence found. Angry Elephants fans declare that a baseball war is looming—that, despite the mountain of evidence, they cannot accept that the Donkeys won the Worldly Series. There’s just NO WAY! The Elephants were overpowering! The Elephants have been the best team ever! The Donkeys didn’t have jack for runs until the ninth inning! NO ONE scores ten runs in an inning like that! Not against such a powerhouse bullpen! THERE’S JUST NO WAY IT COULD HAPPEN! The only possible explanation is a deep-state effort within Supreme League Baseball to hand the win to the Donkeys.

Refusal to Accept Reality

Finally, the new baseball season begins. The game has not been undone. The manager no longer has a job. But furious Red Elephants fans who refuse to accept reality insist that the Elephants really did win the Worldly Series, and they’re hell-bent on proving it.

Meanwhile, the now-former manager is investigated for a pile of allegations that there were steroids on his team, and that his Elephants hitters used corked bats, and that his pitchers used Vaseline. When the video evidence is examined, these are all proven. HIS team was the one breaking all those rules! Former players even admit to all these things. But the manager says that they’ve turned against him and Red Elephants fans shouldn’t believe them. He’s the best manager ever who does everything right and never breaks the rules. Those former players are now working for the Donkeys, apparently, doing everything they can to ensure that the illegitimate winner of the Worldly Series is the reigning champion when EVERYONE knows it’s actually the Elephants.

The rabid Elephants fans who are trying very hard to believe their preferred version of reality do as he says, because they can’t handle the loss, can’t accept not getting their own way, can’t understand that they don’t know everything when they’re convinced they do, and can’t consider that they’re delusional. Non-Elephants fans begin to question why these people are even allowed to be involved in baseball at all, because baseball is played by rules that are clearly outlined in the rulebook, and under those rules the Donkeys won. At some point, they think, these Elephants fans just have to accept the facts and reality… or find a new sport and stop ruining baseball for everyone.

This is how baseball would be played today if those involved treated it the way Trump & Company are treating the presidential election. It sounds silly, but given what we’ve seen with this election, it might not be. What is happening with Trump after the election really is as outlandish as the baseball scenario above, but this matters far more than baseball. If that baseball scenario went down that way, no one would treat it as anything other than the deliberate ignorance of the rules that it is. Yet the same thing is happening with the election that happened in that fictitious baseball game.

Why are we still doing this? Why are we struggling through a raging mob of spoiled children throwing tantrums to get their own way—led by the biggest tantrum-throwing spoiled child of them all?

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the rest of the Blue Donkeys won Game Seven of the 2020 Worldly Series. Donald Trump and Mike Pence and the rest of the Red Elephants lost. The rules were followed. We entertained Trump’s absurd refusal to accept reality, but it’s over. It’s time for everyone who is mentally unbalanced and incapable of rational thought to move on. They won’t, of course, and that’s why anyone that crazy and delusional shouldn’t be allowed to participate in the democratic process.

Unfortunately, the United States Constitution doesn’t allow for stopping people who are disconnected from reality from voting. Maybe it should.

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more. Photos by Kai Oberhäuser, Tim Gouw, Julien Sister and roya ann miller.