CONVENTIONAL WISDOM.(The Talk of the Town)

This week, the pennant race enters the homestretch, as the underdog Boston Red Sox, with their long hair and their mud-encrusted helmets, come to New York to try to catch the incumbent (and clean-shaven) Yankees. By now, thanks to the Democratic and Republican Conventions in Boston and New York and to the current Major League standings, the political analogies are entrenched, if not altogether precise: the Red Sox are Democrats, and the Yankees the G.O.P. Strictly from a management perspective, the Red Sox are progressives, with a front office resembling an activist judiciary, jettisoning tradition at the recommendation of intellectual elites with little practical hardball experience but plenty of theory--in baseball, it's called sabermetrics--on their side. John Kerry is for the Red Sox, at least notionally, and the club's principal owner and its chairman have both donated to his campaign.

Then, in the Bronx, there's the imperial George Steinbrenner, no master of nuance. Steinbrenner gave money to President Bush, and pleaded guilty long ago to funnelling cash illegally to Richard Nixon. (He was eventually pardoned by Ronald Reagan.) He might well be called a compassionless conservative. (Manager Joe Torre, a friend of Rudy Giuliani's, is the compassionate one.) Or, as the Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy observed the other day, on the phone from Oakland, "There's definitely kind of a Steinbrenner-Dick Cheney connection. They seem to be like-minded guys." The Yankees resent the luxury tax that has been imposed so heavily on them by the commissioner's office. Very Republican.

"There is a strong tradition in baseball of not mixing politics with the game," Bill James, the Red Sox' resident sabermetrics guru, said last week, flip-flopping gamely. "One-run, close-to-the-vest, Gene Mauch baseball," he went on, referring to the old California Angels manager, who was a staunch traditionalist, "can be analogized as conservative baseball, whereas Red Sox beat-your-brains-in baseball could be regarded as liberal baseball." Of course, the Yankees, who lead the league in home runs, also play beat-your-brains-in ball. "On the other hand," James continued, "we are 'conservative' on the base paths, not because we ...