The Toronto Blue Jays traded several promising young players to the Detroit Tigers for standout pitcher David Price this week. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
Every year at the end of July, Major League Baseball teams look at their rosters and their records and make a choice. Do they go out and acquire talented veteran players, who would improve their teams as they make a playoff run this year, even if that means giving up promising young players who might improve their teams even more several years from now?
Those decisions come to a head on the last day in July, the deadline for easily completing a Major League trade. (Teams can still trade in August, but their rivals have the ability to block deals.) Several teams have hit the “win now” button ahead of this year’s deadline, including the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Kansas City Royals, the Toronto Blue Jays and, to a smaller degree, the Washington Nationals. Each of those teams has dealt young talent for veteran help. Each is betting, essentially, that it is raising its odds of winning this year’s World Series, without giving up too much ability to win in the future.
For the first summer in recent memory, perhaps in American history, the same calculation is playing out in a presidential race.
It’s a function of the mammoth size of the Republican presidential field, which has grown to nearly 20 big-name candidates, and the dynamics of the party’s first televised debate next week. Every candidate wants to be on stage for that debate, held in Cleveland and broadcast live nationally on Fox News, but the network is limiting participation to the 10 candidates earning the most support in national polls. At least a half-dozen candidates are on the cusp of that stage and could fall on or off it, depending on their showings in polls released over the next few days.
Each of those candidates could improve his or her showings in the polls – and the odds of making the stage – by spending money on television ads. Here’s that baseball-like calculation: If you’re a candidate-on-the-cusp, how much do you spend? An advertising blitz right now could absolutely vault you into the top 10 (as it appears to be doing for former Ohio Gov. John Kasich). It would also leave you with less money to run ads in Iowa and New Hampshire this fall, when the race intensifies and more voters are paying attention.
Further complicating matters is the question of how important, really, this debate will be. There’s a school of thought that says voters will start to mentally cross off candidates who can’t make this first cut, so if you want to win, you should spend whatever it takes to make it. There’s another one that says media coverage of the first debate in particular is likely focus heavily on one candidate, Donald Trump, so grabbing one of the final spots on stage would be like shipping away two future All-Stars for Heathcliffe Slocumb.
In baseball this year, teams are being “mostly rational” in their trading decisions this year, says David Cameron, the managing editor of Fangraphs, an online clearinghouse of baseball statistics and analysis. “The teams that have aggressively added are all in positions where it made sense,” he told me.
When the show ends in Cleveland next week, we’ll have a better idea of which Republican strategies made sense — and which candidates spent big, to no avail.
