From Iowa to New Hampshire and down to the South, the candidates go from coffee shop to restaurant to overcrowded debate stage, tweaking their positions in the field, taking swings at each other and searching for their best fastball. It’s a Darwinian contest, these primaries. They begin with a many-man roster of hopefuls, and some just don’t have it, some can’t grind it out, some run into bad luck — it’s just “not their year”, a familiar saying goes — and the ones who make it through March are poised to play up to November.

A similar process began Tuesday in Florida and Arizona, except the games don’t count there this time of year. The ball players interact with the fans, walking up to the chain-link fences of unpretentious parks to chat and sign autographs in their own version of retail politics. There’s hardly a more intimate environment in all of professional sports, in which the audience and the players are typically separated by a strictly enforced rope line.