It's Congressional Baseball Game Day!

And I've got the stats you're definitely craving.

Good morning!

I know I haven’t been very active on Substack, but sometimes there’s an occasion so momentous, it simply compels one to weigh in. The Congressional Baseball Game is such an occasion.¹

If you’ve followed my work for a while, you probably already know this, but by way of background: Most years since 1909, Democratic and Republican members of Congress have played each other in a charity baseball game that both sides take way too just the right amount of seriously. (The good news is, it’s been years since anyone broke any bones.) This year’s iteration is tonight at 7:05 p.m. Eastern at Nationals Park in Washington, DC. If you can’t make it in person, you can tune in on C-SPAN or FS1.

This will be—holy crap—my 11th year covering the game, but it’s no fun human interest story to me. No, I’m a data journalist who’s a baseball fan, two very dangerous things in combination. So, naturally, I’ve done the nerdiest thing imaginable: With the help of the game’s official scorers, I’ve calculated advanced statistics for all your favorite (and least favorite) members of Congress. That means I can actually give you a semi-serious baseball preview of who is going to win tonight. (For who is going to win in November, please look elsewhere.) So, without further ado, here is how the Republicans and Democrats line up.

Republicans

Does Substack not have the ability to do tables? Very annoying. Anyway, Republicans go into Wednesday’s game as the clear favorites: They’ve won the last three games in a row, and seven of the game’s top 10 players by Wins Above Replacement are Republicans, led by Rep. Greg Steube, the GOP’s answer to Shohei Ohtani. Steube is not only a .500/.611/.786 hitter (and the author of the game’s only outside-the-park home run this century), but he has also started the last four CBGs on the mound, delivering a combined 0.6 wins in value.

Most of the GOP’s other stars are up-and-coming youngsters (by CBG standards—this is Congress, after all), and thus they have impressive stats, but only in a small sample size, so it’s hard to tell how real they are. The canonical example of this is Sen. Eric Schmitt, the game’s best hitter by OPS; although he’s played in only one game (last year’s), he went 2-for-3 with a triple and two walks. Rep. Blake Moore has power too (.300/.417/.600), while Rep. William Timmons brings the speed off the bench (12-for-12 in stolen bases). Rep. August Pfluger is another two-way star, an Ichiro-esque singles hitter (.462/.500/.462) who can also get Steube out of a jam on the mound. In three games, he has posted a 1.11 ERA and struck out 38% of the batters he’s faced.

Democrats

As of press time, Democrats hadn’t unveiled their starting 10 (yeah, the Congressional Baseball Game plays it a little fast and loose with the rules), so this is simply my guess at how they’ll line up tonight. And it’s a decent, if inconsistent, crew. They have two of the game’s best hitters in Reps. Jimmy Panetta and Chris Deluzio. Panetta is a veteran (and also the son of a veteran—former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta) who has slugged two triples and an inside-the-park home run during his six-game tenure, compiling a .556/.600/.944 batting line. Deluzio, meanwhile, is just a sophomore, but he impressed during his debut last year with a double, a walk, and a hit-by-pitch in four plate appearances. (Then again, that’s a pretty small sample size, so maybe he’s not going to get on base 75% of the time going forward.)

The rest of the lineup is more questionable, both literally (in the sense that I don’t know if they are actually going to play or not) and figuratively. While Rep. Pete Aguilar is a stalwart, with a .912 OPS over eight games, Rep. Raul Ruiz seems overmatched at leadoff, where he has hit since 2015. And the team seemed to have high hopes for freshman Rep. Dan Goldman last year, but he went 0-for-4 out of the cleanup spot. The jury is still out on whether he just had a bad game or if he’ll be a Fernando Martínez-level prospect bust.

But the real problem Democrats need to solve is how to get outs; they’ve given up an average of 13 runs per game in their current three-game losing streak. Last year’s solution, Deluzio, did not cut it: He gave up 11 earned runs in 2⅓ innings, in which he walked 27% of the batters he faced. This year, they could turn to Aguilar, a soft-tosser with a 7.17 ERA (which is actually only slightly below average—a 109 ERA–, in sabermetric-speak—in the high-scoring CBG environment). But instead, I’m thinking they will start Sen. Alex Padilla, a former high-school baseball star who was a prized recruit to the CBG when he was first appointed to the Senate in 2021 but—so far at least—has never had time to play in the game.

This year, though, Padilla told local news that he will indeed be pitching for the Democrats. If he is indeed the starter, we’ll know soon if he has the stuff to keep Republicans at bay and hand Democrats their first win on the baseball diamond since 2019.

1. Yes, I wrote a not-insignificant part of that Wikipedia page. Why, is that weird?