It may be 64 years after the New York Mets losing 120 baseball matches in their debut season led manager Casey Stengel to plead “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Yet The Wall Street Journal columnist William A. Galston notes that the same question could still apply to another “two monumentally inept teams.”
He doesn’t have in mind the Chicago White Sox, whose 121-loss season in 2024 led first-year Met Ed Kranepool to confess to the Journal that “I feel sorry for them,” or the Colorado Rockies beating the equally longstanding Mets record for rock-bottom run differential last year. Instead, Galston has in mind the Democrats and Republicans, “Capitol Hill’s Unlovable Losers” (May 27).
Less than two full years after the 2024 presidential election, Galston has merely to nod at the former party’s abject failure to learn from their loss, and the latter’s squandering of what little momentum remains from their win. UCLA School of Law professor Stephen Bainbridge adds: “at least we’re better off than the UK, which has about half-a-dozen incompetent teams.”
The iconic cinematic line from WarGames about it being “a strange game” if logic dictates that “the only winning move is not to play” applies not only to nuclear war, but the nuclear-option scorched-earth tactics that increasingly dominate electoral and cultural wars. While the suggested alternative of “a nice game of chess” offers at least a level playing field and an even chance to win — and even the most underdog of sports teams at least have some real if slim possibility of an upset — all-encompassing politicization fares even worse than such comparison implies.
After all, the psychological investment into two-sided competitive games isn’t quite as zero-sum as the scoring suggests. John Astin’s Dr. Gangreen in the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes animated episode “The Great Tomato Wars” finds “the agony of defeat” to be as appealing as “the thrill of victory” — as he also puts it: “I hate ties! I like winners and losers” — and one need not go that far to appreciate a well-played contest. Affairs of state divert resources from win-win voluntary deals to sports arenas whose business doesn’t need them to earn consumer dollars, and other battlegrounds where the vintage 2004 Alien vs. Predator tagline “whoever wins … we lose.” perpetually applies to a closer-to-home species of space invaders.
For a less unlovable political loser, Galston could have turned to Jimmy Breslin, the author of a book about the 1962 Mets named after Stengel’s remark. While Kranepool helped take his team from last place to triumph in the 1969 World Series, Breslin finished in penultimate place as Norman Mailer’s running mate for NYC mayor.
Observing that “the last thing that New York can afford at this time is a politician thinking in normal politicians’ terms,” Breslin offered not just a long-shot chance of change at the top (Mailer optimistically estimated a chance of winning the race around 5%) but the promise of moving much of daily life to local community decision-making by neighbors — and so out of the control of elected, and unelected, officials entirely.
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
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