The Electoral College as it relates to the Rules of Major League Baseball.
 

This afternoon, I was driving past Wrigley Field while listening to a story on WBEZ about how everything is biased and unfair, and it dawned on me that in slightly more than one year from today, people at both extremes of the two-party system in the US are going to be loudly shouting (again) about how the concept of the Electoral College is either inherently unfair or absolutely necessary, with which group is claiming which viewpoint depending upon the outcome of the election.

And it got me to thinking about the fact that within two months of my moving to Chicago, into an apartment from which I could clearly see the pitcher's mound and home plate (53rd floor, mind you), the Cubs did a thing considered so unlikely that it was a throwaway gag in the movie Back to the Future II.

(Also, wanna know the definition of a shitty commute? Try driving through World Series traffic.)



Anyway, consider the following thought experiment:


Let us suppose that in some hypothetical universe, the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians have both come out on top of their playoffs, and are facing one another in the World Series. We shall say that the series is played for all seven possible games, with the following results:




So, who won?

Well, according to the rules of Major League Baseball, the Cubs got more runs than the Indians in four of the seven games, and therefore, they are the winner, with 4 games to the Indians' 3.

But wait a minute. If you look at the overall count, the Indians scored 34 runs, whereas the Cubs scored only 32. How is that fair?


Just something I thought interesting.

Interesting, but where the analogy breaks down for me is when you consider the well known fact that there's no crying in baseball...

not sure how this relates.

https://mk0brilliantmaptxoqs.kinstac...yvoteshare.png

Republicans don't like living in places with commerce and industry?

In all seriousness, I don't know how it relates, either. You can be pretty random some times.

I know you're using a rhetorical statement, given that the largest commercial airline maintenance facility in the world is here in lowly Oklahoma.

https://www.businessinsider.com/2016...a-sea-of-red-4

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.mia...f401621d74.png

That picture makes it easy to see how lazy people congregate around the free handouts.

Likewise, the US factories of most Japanese & Korean automakers are also located in the south-eastern US. This is logical, as labor is cheap in that region.

Pick two equally-sized cities, one in a blue county in either SoCal or the Bay Area, and one in a red county in the south, and compare the GDP-per-capita. Pick any two cities you want, and let me know the results. (Repeat as many times as you wish for blue in New England vs. red in the west, etc.)

No need, because I know exactly what you're getting at. Sure I could make 2x in San Francisco (or the surrounding area) that I make here in OKC. But I'd live in a shitty studio, without a car, and dependent on the company shuttle to get me to work and back.

I'd retort and say, pick two equally-sized cities where an average person can actually afford to own a home (whether that be a subdivision, acreage, condo, townhouse, etc) vs the Bay Area, for example.

There is a reason Austin is already "Silicone Valley Jr." The big tech companies don't even hire on the west coast anymore, for the most part. All the big tech companies are/have built in Austin. Oracle isn't even finished building their new campus on the south side of the river, and in 18 months I've watched the price of housing in Austin (on the south side) start to creep up at well past the inflation rate.

That's one way of looking at it.

Another way would be to observe that areas which have strong commercial / industrial bases tend to contribute strongly to the US economy (especially when they produce export commodities), whereas cities which do not tend to be a net drain on the US economy (by consuming more in the way of subsidies and entitlement than they contribute.)

As an example, Burbank, CA and Wichita Falls, TX both have about the same size population- just slightly over 100,000. And yet Burbank produces billions of dollars per year in productivity (Lockheed Martin, Warner Music, Columbia Pictures, Walt Disney, NBC, Warner Bros., etc), much of which is exported to foreign countries and therefore contributes positively to the value of the US dollar and to the US economy as a whole.

Whereas Wichita Falls produces... nothing.


I'll be honest: I do kind of envy people who get to choose where they want to live. All else being equal, I'd much rather be back in SoCal than here in Chicago. But the nature of my business is such that the good job opportunities are located in the largest cities, because that's where the ad revenue is. Braineack is in much the same position as I am, and can sympathize.


Personal anecdote: About five years ago, when I was working as the #3 (Maintenance Supervisor) at WPIX TV in New York, I was offered a job as the #1 (Director of Engineering) at KFOR TV (channel 4) in OKC. I very politely declined this offer, because, well, it was in Oklahoma.


And none of this, of course, is in any way relevant to the over-arching point of this thread, which is that, as a broad generalization, many of the same people who decry the unfairness of the electoral college system think nothing at all of the unfairness of the rules of Major League Baseball.

(You can probably substitute the rules of the NFL or the NBA as well, though I'll admit to knowing very little about how their annual championship systems work.)

You got to make a choice.

The framers intended a system whereby the “common man” insofar as he was white, male and a landowner each got a vote. The electoral college insured that those “common men” made the right decision in the eyes of the electors. Prior to 1804 it also awarded President and Vice President to the 1st and 2nd vote getters vs. by party or ticket today. The south counted slaves as 3/5 of a “person” (my italics because they didn’t believe them to be a person) so even though they had no vote they were counted for representation (40% of the south were slaves then).

My point... it’s undergone numerous changes over the decades to remedy or at least keep up with the will of the people. So, why not now? Just a topic for debate.

Regarding MLB... it’s a private corporation so they don’t have to be fair nor even pretend so long as revenue keeps coming in.

Joe,

I'm not on board with your analogy. In either case, owners and management would build a team to score the most runs. There has to be a different strategy tied to the different outcomes. What about this... the difference between the electoral college and popular vote, is like the difference between playing to win by scoring the most runs in nine innings, vs. playing to hit the most home runs in nine innings. Voting ends at a certain time in every state (except Florida), so there's no overtime in these hypothetical games.

Owners and management would recruit, train, and play differently if the goal was hitting the most home runs vs. just scoring the most runs batted in. I believe Trump would have had a different strategy if the ultimate goal was only to win the popular vote. I don't believe Hillary would have done anything different.

One of my favorite things to say when some douchebag democrat says George Bush stole the election from Al Gore with Florida is to point out that Al didn't carry his home state of Tennessee. The people that knew him and his family best did not want him to be president. Had he won Tennessee, Florida would not have mattered.

. This is not accurate. From Wikipedia

The Three-Fifths Compromise was a compromise reached among state delegates during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention. Whether and, if so, how slaves would be counted when determining a state's total population for legislative representation and taxing purposes was important, as this population number would then be used to determine the number of seats that the state would have in the United States House of Representatives for the next ten years. The compromise solution was to count three out of every five slaves as people for this purpose. Its effect was to give the Southern states a third more seats in Congress and a third more electoral votes than if slaves had been ignored, but fewer than if slaves and free people had been counted equally. The compromise was proposed by delegate James Wilson and seconded by Charles Pinckney on June 11, 1787.[1]

This is basic history shit.

The rules are perfectly* fair, though. The point isn't to hit the most runs in 63 innings. The point is to win the most games out of seven. The teams play within the same framework, with equal time* given to each team, in the same ballpark.

*Ignoring the blatant commercial viability of such a decision, the only thing that might make it more fair is if they played all seven games in a neutral ballpark, instead of traveling back and forth between the two teams' home parks. (Or the winner of the All-Star game getting home field advantage, but I assure you that I'll break IB's shitty forum far before I'm able to fully elaborate on the consequences of that specific section of the rulebook.)

Let's take your posit and hone it a bit, though. Let's take your 7 game hypothetical World Series and change the lengths of the games a bit. In 5 of the games, the teams will play 9 innings each. In two of the games, the teams will play 3 innings each.

Ignore the rules. It's your universe, you decide: Should the games where only 3 innings are played count the same as the ones where 9 innings are played? Would one consider the skill-based outcome of those 3-inning games to be equally weighted to the 9-inning games?

Would your opinion of those two games change if the Indians were not allowed to play with bats during the shortened games?

Should the leader of the free world be selected in a similar method, where 5 games get 9 innings and 2 games get 3?

Also, I can't pass up this opportunity:

Did Roger Goodell run anti-Indians propaganda advertising across all conceivable forms of media for the 18 months prior to the playing of the World Series?

:party:

Sorry, how is it not accurate?

Actually, the Cubs won five games...

Did you miss the part in the first post which said "Let us suppose that in some hypothetical universe, the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians..."? The numbers were adjusted to fit the narrative.

EDIT: Also, not sure if you're trolling here. It's impossible to win five games in the MLB World Series. It may be that I'm ignorant enough about baseball to miss some subtle joke here. I'm good at making sure that baseball gets on TV. Not so much at being the sort of person who understands the intricacies of the infield fly rule*.





EDIT: there are other posts in this thread which are worthy of a reply. At present, I have been awake for about 60 hours, and thus I'm not in top form. I kinda wish these penguins would get out of my office.

You said "The south counted slaves as 3/5 of a “person” (my italics because they didn’t believe them to be a person) so even though they had no vote they were counted for representation (40% of the south were slaves then)."

CONGRESS counted slaves as 3/5 of a person due to the agreed to compromise. The South would have wanted to count them as a whole person. I didn't say you were wrong, just not accurate. Words mean things, and a lot of people use the exact same words as you did when describing how slaves were counted back then, completely ignoring the fact that is was a "compromise reached among state delegates during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention".

It would be more accurate to say the NORTH didn't want to count slaves as persons at all, 0/5 so-to-speak, in order to prevent southern states from gaining seats in the House.