Bill James Predicted Donald Trump's Presidential Candidacy In 2001, While Writing About The Flawed Voting System For The Gold Glove Award
I feel like any time that politics intersect with baseball and I have to write about it, I always have to disclose that I don’t give a fuck about politics. I hated both candidates. There ya go. Anyway, I did find it interesting that Bill James, the Godfather of Sabermetrics, predicted that Donald Trump could become a candidate for President of the United States. In 2001.
In The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James was writing about Rafael Palmeiro. It’s funny now, because we know why, but the entry starts out with, “Now in his late thirties, but playing the best ball of his career.” Gee, I wonder how that could be. But the point of the entry was to discuss Palmeiro’s Gold Glove award at first base in 1999 (he only played 28 games at first base that year), and how a “badly designed voting system” allowed this to happen, thus drawing a comparison to the presidential voting system.
The larger point, it seems to me, is that a badly designed voting system will fail sometimes, no matter who votes. The Gold Glove is decided by what could be called an unconstrained plurality, meaning:
1. A voter can vote for anybody.
2. If the top vote-getter gets 15% of the vote, he wins, the same as if he had received 80%.
A voting structure like this is an open invitation to an eccentric outcome. If the United States were to use a system like this to elect the President, the absolutely certain result would be that, within a few elections, someone like David Duke, Donald Trump, or Warren Beatty would be elected President. If you can win an election with 15% of the vote, sooner or later somebody will. An unconstrained plurality vote gives an opening to someone or something who has a strong appeal to a limited number of people.
Columnist Joe Posnanski explains how James’ frustration with how Palmeiro won the Gold Glove award in 1999 is eerily similar to how Trump was elected president in 2016.
OK, do you see that? Bill predicted that DONALD TRUMP (and David Duke is in there too) could be elected President if you had a voting structure where there’s an unconstrained plurality. He predicted this 16 years ago. And then, what happened in this election cycle? The Republican Party had a WHOLE BUNCH of candidates (roughly the same number as first basemen in the American League in 1999. And Trump moved to the forefront by getting an unconstrained plurality, first in the 15-20 percent range, then higher, then higher. No matter where you stand on the Trump candidacy, it was this math that paved the way, and Bill saw it many years ago.
Bill James is a genius. This is just another example of that. Regardless of the fact that he’s the equivalent of watching your grandfather fall asleep after Thanksgiving dinner when he’s on TV, he’s still fascinating to read. I just wish that he could’ve predicted a better celebrity to become president in the future. Who was big back in 2001, Tom Cruise, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Howard Stern? He’s still big now, but I’d vote for Howard, no doubt.