What Politics Should Borrow From Baseball
An entire industry is dedicated to evaluating baseball players using advanced, always-evolving metrics. Why not do the same with politicians?
I love fantasy baseball. (It's far superior to fantasy football — which I also enjoy — but that's an argument for another day.) Baseball statistics are pure. They may not reflect the exact, perfect truth of a player, but I think they come pretty close, at least compared to other sports' statistics.
Politicians can be difficult to evaluate. Their arena is opaque, perhaps intentionally so. If a fan wants to see the xBA or exit velocity for Dodgers rookie James Outman, they can look it up on FanGraphs or any number of websites. If a citizen wants to see, understand, and put into context the track record of an elected official, it’s not quite as easy. They would have to follow the goings-on in their region very closely (and ideally, possess a robust understanding of history and government structure) to have a solid grasp of the political landscape, which, maybe, is just the price one must pay to be informed.
But as the baseball season rolls toward summer and political machines rumble to life, I find myself wishing the latter would have some of the transparency of the former.
Instead, civic engagement seems to follow a familiar pattern: People get riled up for or against candidates on the ballot, one side wins and rejoices, the other regroups, and the newly-elected politicians go to Concord or Washington to serve. But after that point, the winning politicians’ activity becomes a bit of a black box. TV spots, tweets, headlines, conversation, etc. help citizens cobble together some idea of how a politician is performing while in office, but it’s likely a shallow understanding.
What if there was an accessible, data-driven lens to help constituents evaluate their elected officials?
Scoring Politicians with “CitizenGraphs”
I want a FanGraphs for politics: a user-friendly website that puts into context how a politician is performing compared to their peers and previous office holders. This website would source publicly-available data on things like campaign finance, voting records, appointments, attendance, etc. and “score” legislation and political action so that it could be attributed to the politicians who acted upon it. There would be leaderboards and “player” pages. You could call it CitizenGraphs (the .com is available, by the way.)
Two caveats, before I continue:
As far as I know, the above idea doesn’t exist — but there are a bunch of wonderful websites out there for citizens looking to track the work of politicians. I list a few of them at the end of this post.
To create a website like CitizenGraphs, some big questions would need to be answered, including: who would fund the website? Who would maintain it? And how would it score legislation and other political action?
In the spirit of keeping this post relatively short and accomplishing some of the other things on my to-do list today, I won’t wander too far into answering these questions, and probably am not equipped to, anyway. That said, one approach to the question of “scoring” would be to position CitizenGraphs as a trusted, politically-neutral platform and provider of raw data. It would host a diverse range of third-party publishers who would interpret and use CitizenGraphs data to create the metrics (which would have to be publicly defined and updated) that would populate the website.
While it’s not a perfect comparison, these metrics could differ like, say, xERA and FIP do. Some baseball fans look at both when evaluating a pitcher, some prefer one or the other. On CitizenGraphs, The Economist, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal could all have their own competing metrics. Each participating organization would have to determine and share how they use the CitizenGraphs data. And while scoring (and weighing!) legislation would demand a lot of thought, it’s not unheard of. Special interest groups, like The League of Conservation Voters and NRA do it regularly.
One big difference between scoring political action and scoring a baseball game is that once a baseball game is finished, its statistics are basically set in stone. A home run hit in 1923 is still on the books as a home run a century later. Not so in politics. Legislation that passes today may be popular (or unpopular) in the moment, but the march of time can reveal unforeseen effects that eventually reshape public perception. So, on CitizenGraphs, a bill could receive one score this year, but a different one in 3 years, 6 years, 21 years, which would change — for better or worse — the scores and rankings of the politicians who were tied to it. In other words, a home run could turn into a strikeout, or vice versa.
That doesn’t mean we can’t factor in the contemporary environment when evaluating political action. Again, baseball provides a good example here. ERA+ accounts for “external factors like ballparks and opponents. It then adjusts, so a score of 100 is league average, and 150 is 50 percent better than the league average.” Said differently, ERA+ lets fans fairly compare pitchers across history, from the dead-ball era to the run-happy, steroid-infused one. A similar approach with CitizenGraphs would allow us to compare Biden’s Congress to FDR’s, or Trump’s to Reagan’s.
We’re Not Selling Jeans Here, But We Kind of Are
"We're not selling jeans here," Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane famously said to a scout who criticized a player because he didn’t “look” the part of a star. Beane argued for a focus on production, and production alone.
Twenty years later, the conversation around player evaluation has completely changed — not just for the clubs, but for fans, too. Today, the average fan has access to better metrics than the top decision-maker for the Yankees did in the early 2000s. A thriving industry has emerged around evaluating ball players. Why can’t a similar revolution happen in politics?
Maybe this is all a little too simplistic, a little too Mr.-Smith-Goes-to-Washington, and people aren’t interested in earnestly evaluating the performance of their elected officials, because everything is tribal, they already know which way they’re voting, they don’t care about data, etc. But I think that’s an overly-cynical reading.
A system like this wouldn’t be a shortcut for knowledge or a replacement for engagement, but a helpful supplement for voters seeking more clarity and confidence when casting their vote.
In a world where baseball fans can delve into intricate details of a player’s performance, let’s strive for a similar level of data-driven evaluation in the political arena, and measure politicians by the merit of their production.
Government-Tracking Resources for Citizens
Thanks for reading! This is the fourth and final internet essay I wrote for my third Season of Writing. I’ll share my focus for the next season soon. If you’re interested in following along, subscribe below, and you’ll receive my writing in your inbox.