So Willard decided to compare the current unemployment numbers to a sports score and equated President Obama to a failed coach worthy of firing (and we remember Mitt likes to fire people).
One of my peeves about sports analogies is their ubiquity. As a teacher, I get a lot of them from admins who used to coach. While they overuse them, they usually* use them correctly.
My other peeve is the rampant misapplication of sports analogies. And here's where Governer Romney comes in (dive past the squiggly)...
23 million to nothing is a pretty awful score. I would consider firing a coach who was in a pattern of losing big over several contests. As a Timbers fan, I saw a coach let go for the team under-performing earlier this season. As a Red Sox fan, I saw a manager let go in the off-season following a collapse and I WISH I'd see his replacement dismissed, as well.... But the coach isn't the right comparison here.
In Romney's analogy, the "coach" is more accurately the voters - we are the entity making the on-field personnel decisions. And he would be correct that we aren't doing it well (cuz we are a collective of several million folks with very different ideas of how things work)... but that isn't the point he hopes to make. Mitt wants to make a point about the lopsided score. 0 to 23 million. This presumes several factors, any one of which will wreck the analogy.
First, for this to work, the score needed to be 0-0 when Obama 'entered the game'... No President in US History came into a scoreless game. Not even George Washington. So Mitt might want to look into the relief pitcher, inherited runners, and W/L/Save stats in baseball. They are much more applicable here, but still problematic, as a relief pitcher can still serve up a beautiful ground ball to a shortstop that SHOULD be an inning ending double play and still have a fielding or throwing error result in no outs, or only one out, runs, etc...so in this relief pitcher version of the analogy, there is the rest of the defensive squad who are ALSO accountable for getting 3 outs and keeping runners off the bases, and in this version, Congress is the logical analog for the guys playing in the field (and providing run support at the plate).
In an analogous baseball game, a reliever enters in the top of the 5th, facing a 7-2 deficit, bases loaded and one out and over four innings of solid work allows one inherited runner to score on a sac fly and one unearned run in a later inning after a walk, two errors and another sac fly. Meanwhile (and since it's an AL game, the pitcher can't even help his cause at the plate), over those remaining four innings, his team records 3 runs on 6 hits, and over the whole game strands men on base in every inning. Final score is 9-5. Too little, too late. Mitt Romney is going to blame the reliever. He'll send him down to Pawtucket. But guess who didn't lose that game? The relief pitcher may be the least guilty guy on the field.
Second, it scores jobless (23 million) against...what? jobbed? Well, that'd wreck him, too, cuz then the score would be (roughly) 147 million to 23 million. Let's drop the "million" so we can be in a neighborhood that actually MIGHT happen in a sports score: 147-23 (I can see a lopsided Olympic basketball game getting here). Round even more and call it 15-2, and suddenly, we are in either CONCACAF women's or Oceania men's World Cup qualification territory or recent Red Sox/A's results... BUT, using the numbers this way, depersonalizes the unemployment issue, so is a pretty cynical way to go...
Ultimately, Romney risks encountering someone who understands policy, politics AND sports better than him opening a can of whup ass. And he's running against that someone.
[update] - Here come the analogies from Obama via @sbnation
*HS admins analogy use may vary. Diarist's experience may not be typical.