Clinton faces two outs in bottom of the ninth

The Democratic race could still throw a few curveballs.

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — If the 2008 Democratic presidential race were a baseball season, Hillary Clinton would need the greatest comeback in major league history to clinch the nomination.

In a campaign that has been consumed by mathematical projections — and admittedly overrun by sports metaphors — that’s perhaps the easiest way to understand the odds facing the New York senator who entered the campaign looking like a 1927 Yankees-style lock to carry the party banner in November.

Clinton and rival Barack Obama have combined to secure about 88 percent of the available delegates in their nomination battle, the rough equivalent of playing 142 games in a 162-game baseball season. Obama is sitting in first place with a small but significant lead in delegates. But unlike Sen. John McCain of Arizona on the Republican side, Obama has not amassed enough delegates to capture his nomination.

At a similar point in a baseball playoff race, fans start obsessing over their team’s “magic number,” the games it must win — or its opponent must lose, or a combination of the two — to wrap up a postseason berth.

Obama needs to win about 36 percent of the remaining delegates, according to The Associated Press, to wrap up the nomination. If the primaries were a baseball season and Obama were a team, there would be 20 games left to play, Obama would have a 14-game lead and his magic number would be seven.

No major league team has ever blown a lead that large, that late. Baseball’s most infamous late-season collapses belong to last year’s New York Mets, who blew a seven-game lead with 17 left to play, and the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies, who were up 6.5 games with 12 to play. Cubs fans will also recall their 1969 team, which lost a five-game lead in early September and finished eight games out of first.

The Colorado Rockies won 21 of 22 games last year to claim the National League wild card and roll into the World Series. A Middlebury College professor put the odds of that feat at more than 190,000 to 1.

Clinton “is probably facing something of that magnitude” to win the nomination, said Rick Ridder, a Democratic political consultant — and Rockies season-ticket holder — in Denver, who directed Clinton’s Arizona primary campaign.

Political junkies can be every bit as rabid and stat-obsessed as sports fans. Those involved in the Democratic race know that Obama’s political magic number is 178, according to the AP, meaning that’s how many delegates he needs to wrap up the nomination. The Obama campaign reminds reporters of the dwindling number every time it adds a new superdelegate to his column.

“We can see the finish line,” campaign manager David Plouffe told reporters Wednesday, a day after Obama won North Carolina and narrowly lost Indiana.

The Democratic race still could throw a few curveballs at its participants before it ends. Party leaders still must decide how to treat delegates elected in Florida and Michigan in January in violation of the party-imposed primary calendar. Neither candidate campaigned actively in either state, and Obama’s name did not appear on the Michigan ballot.

Currently, those delegates do not count toward the nomination. The Clinton campaign wants them to. If party leaders agree, Obama’s magic number would grow, and Clinton’s odds for victory would improve.

Many pundits declared the race over this week. A few refused to rule out a Clinton comeback.

If he were advising Obama, Ridder said, he’d quote the great pitcher Satchel Paige: “Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.” For Clinton, he’d quote the baseball sage Yogi Berra: “It ain’t over till it’s over.”