To offer my own anecdote, yes, i do like the DH. Why? Because when I started following baseball, Andre Thornton was Cleveland's best and most popular player, and he was a DH. Back in those days, there really weren't all that many Indians players worth rooting for (like none), so we all grew up cheering for a DH.
Roger
Another possibility.
A baseball game is a game between two teams where all the players play both offensive and defensive. The DH rule, in allowing the pitcher to play only half of his responsibility would strike a generic conservative person as unfair.
Give the frequent disparity between a pitcher pitching ability and his hitting non-ability allowing a DH would strike a generic liberal person as fair.
Ironically, as time goes on and this becomes the established practice there will be an increasing acceptability form conservatives as it is long standing practice.
Hank -- the authors offer the same theoretical speculation, but did not find an especially strong negative correlation with conservatism and the DH. The findings were stronger for party ID.
I'm with Hank on this one. There is a conservative element to National League baseball - the "senior circuit," the George Wills of the world saying that things ain't as good as they used to be.
Of course, I'd argue that anyone who believes in the DH isn't a real baseball fan, but that's just me.
Or perhaps that's it as well - people who are fans of the DH don't particularly love it - I don't know if people truly will defend it - but people who hate it and don't believe in it genuinely hate it. Is there a correlation there between being a Democrat and political salience? I don't know.
And Jeff Gill does some really interesting work on Bayesian formal modeling, aside from this stuff.
As a male Not A Democrat and foe of the DH, I fully support these results. Disclosure: grew up as a fan of an NL team (Astros).
I hate the DH with a passion I otherwise only hold against teams that beat my beloved Cubs (yes, that means all of them, but especially the Cardinals, Astros, Mets, and Marlins), and I'm a conservative Democrat. I'm surprised party ID has a stronger correlation than the conservative/liberal divide. I would think pro-business Republicans would be as in favor of the DH rule (more offense = more popular sport, more revenue, etc.) as progressive Democrats, who generally view any modernization favorably. Now they need to have a poll about aluminum vs. wood bats.
Speaking for myself, I have more of a problem with the wild card than I do with the DH. Perhaps this is because I can't really remember baseball before the DH, but I can remember it before the wild card. Or perhaps it's because the wild card offends my sense of elegance (teams that can't even win their stinkin' divisions should not be competing for a chance to appear in the World Series! -- and yes, that even holds if the Yankees squeak into the wild card spot this year) while the DH does not.
In any event, the idea that correlating party affiliation with responses to questions about the DH is somehow revealing -- that it tells us more than the oft-noticed but causally meaningless correlations between sunspot activity and the stock market, for example -- strikes me as precisely the kind of absurdity that gives statistical analysis a bad name. I don't buy "Democrat-ness" as a dispositional essence-of-person that could somehow influence what that person does or says, but this is precisely what a statistical-comparative analysis of those two responses is, albeit implicitly, saying. It's interesting that Democrats seem to embrace the DH rule more than independents or Republicans, but I can't possibly fathom a mechanisms that would make causal sense of that finding ("are more likely to accept socio-political changes" strikes me as stretching, especially since we're talking about self-declared party affiliation here, and as we know people express an affinity for a political party for all sorts of idiosyncratic reasons).
The timing hypothesis seems more plausible to me -- at any rate, there's a mechanism one could in principle trace. And doing so would prevent us from entering into the surreal world of categorical causation, wherein one's membership in a category (like "Republican" or "male") compels one to act in a certain way. Abrogation of responsibility, anyone?
PTJ: My colleague pointed me to this article moments after talking about his long-term goal of publishing in the The Journal of Irreproducible Results.
I hate the DH. Always have and always will.
I am an outlier based upon this study though. I am a died in the wool pro-union lefty who has lived most of my life in "Da city dat works" as a Cub fan.
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