In Massachusetts Senate Race, It Comes Down to Sex and Baseball

With no exit polls to feed the fire of our speculation in the Massachusetts special election being held today for the late Teddy Kennedy's Senate seat, we have to make our own analysis. It's like the days of yore before exit polling existed. We just have to wait with bated breath and keep talking about all the campaign's scandals until news can break through from the front.

So, here goes: If Republican candidate, State Senator Scott Brown, wins over Democratic candidate, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, after the polls close at 8 pm, we have two influences to thank: Sex and baseball.

Let's just admit it right now: Brown was every bit hot enough to be posing nude as "America's Sexiest Man" in Cosmo in 1982. If this skeleton popped out of a female candidate's closet, she would be branded as "that kind" of woman (unless, perhaps, she was Sarah Palin), but it only seems to have made people giggle and raise their eyebrows where Brown is concerned. "Obviously we know how to pick ’em," Cosmo crowed. "There have been plenty of pics of our president running around without his shirt, so now that a precedent has been set, we’re hoping to see Scott shirtless again."

While some old-timers might be offended, I dare you to find me one person who will say that (1) Brown isn't pleasing to the eyes, and (2) his 28-year-old flirtation with modeling should alarm anyone enough to withhold a vote for him today. And, to be honest, it might just gain him a few. Brown 1, Coakley 0.

It is another matter with the baseball side of our story, which concerns Coakley's dangerous lack of knowledge about the members of the Boston Red Sox. Before you non-sports-fans out there roll your eyes, let me impress something upon you: Bostonians are as serious about their baseball as Italians are about their soccer (excuse me, I mean "football").

This might seem trivial to those of you who were not standing in a Boston bar in 2003 on the night the Sox lost Game 7 of the American League Series to the Yankees in the eleventh inning. Let me just say that grown men with the physique of Mr. T began to blubber like babies and didn't try to hide it.

Coakley's identification of Curt Schilling (a retired pitcher who helped the Red Sox reverse the curse to win the World Series in 2004 and 2007) as a Yankees fan is unforgivable to those who approach Red Sox fandom as a way of life. For those of you who don't get sports, this would be like saying Lincoln was a big admirer of the Confederacy or that, to pick an appropriate analogy, Senator Kennedy was opposed to universal health care.

For baseball junkies, which is just about everybody where Coakley lives, her ignorance reveals an unacceptable myopia about her constituency. Yet another example of high-falutin', arugula-eating liberals who don't know what a real summer day is made for. Yet again: Brown 1, Coakley 0.

Sure, politics matter too, and no doubt Brown's success is due in large part to a feeling of distress about how Democrats are handling power in Washington. But I would wager that the sex and the baseball (especially the baseball) are not insubstantial forces in this race in which, no matter who wins, Brown's remarkable showing is big news.

Scott Brown photo via Getty Images

Fenway Photo courtesy of Edwizzle via flickr