Baseball is a game designed for summer. The season is 162 games over 6 months. It's not like football which requires maximum effort every play - so much effort that it takes a week to properly recover before playing the next game. It's not like basketball which requires constant running and movement. Baseball has a slower pace - a pace appropriate for playing in the heat of summer. And the season is long and grueling. Most importantly, no team wins every game. If you are a baseball player, you are going to lose games. There is no way around that. But losing one game during the season is not the end. You get up the next day and play again. Losing yesterday no longer matters. It's about today's game, not yesterday's game or tomorrow's game.

The problem with that metaphor, though, is that politics isn't like baseball. It's not a sequence of individual contests that begin afresh with each new game. It's not an athletic contest where the rules are such that no one can "win" every game. A competent, capable politician should never turn in a performance like Biden did last night.

This isn't a "just one bad game" type of scenario. Biden has been struggling with voters for quite a while now, and we're well into the heart of the 2024 campaign. Voters are concerned about his age, and he has not been able to dispel that for months now (if not longer).

If one insists on the baseball metaphor, this is analogous to a starting pitcher having struggled with an injury all season and being down in the minors, and finally getting called up about 3/5 of the way through the season and getting their first start. And then not just getting lit up and losing the game, but visibly pitching horribly and not being able to complete their normal pitching motion. In that scenario, you wouldn't just wave it away by noting that even the best pitchers at the top of their form sometimes have a single bad game - you would look at that performance and correctly conclude that they weren't capable of pitching in the majors in their current condition.