Presidents, Baseball, and Wins above Expectations: What Can Sabermetrics Tell Us about Presidential Success? Why Ronald Reagan is like Bobby Cox and Lyndon Johnson is like Joe Torre
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ABSTRACTPresidential scholars and baseball writers debate who were the greatest. While baseball analysis evolved from qualitative impressions of experts to rigorous, data-driven sabermetrics, analysis of presidential greatness continues to rely on old-school reputational rankings based on surveys of scholars qualitative assessments. Presidential-congressional relations and baseball are all about winning, but what fans (of sports and politics) find most intriguing is Wins Above Expectations (WAE)did the team do better or worse than expected? This paper adapts the Pythagorean Expectations (PE) formula developed to analyze baseball to assess legislative success of presidents from Eisenhower to Obama. A parsimonious regression model and the PE formula predict annual success rates with 90% accuracy. The estimates of WAE from the two approaches, however, are uncorrelated. Regression analysis does not identify any president who systematically exceeded expectations, but sabermetric analysis indicates that Republican presidents outperform Democrats. Neither approach correlates with recent presidential greatness rankings.
