The topic of this episode is, “Does the Congressional Baseball Game increase collaboration in Congress?”
Each June, members of our national legislature play ball. Democrats and Republicans from the House of Representatives each field a team, practice, and then play a game. The 2026 Congressional Baseball Game is on Wednesday, June 10, at 7:05 pm EDT at Nationals Park in Washington, DC. This tradition goes back to 1909, and the proceeds are contributed to charities.
More than a few Americans have scoffed at this event and groused that elected officials should be inside the Capitol doing their jobs. And sadly, the Congressional Baseball Game has been targeted by political extremists. Environmental activists ran onto the field during the 2024 game in hopes of drawing attention to their cause. They got booed, rightly. And one far left kook shot Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) and four other individuals at a practice for the game.
My guest is SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor. She is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. She is also a faculty affiliate at the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which produces studies that entail who in Congress gets things done—and who doesn’t. SoRelle recently coauthored an article on the Congressional Baseball Game titled “Playing Ball: Collaboration in the U.S. Congress.”
And I would be remiss if I did not mention that Professor Gaynor is the coauthor of Congress Explained: Representation and Lawmaking in the First Branch (CQ Press) and the author of the forthcoming book, Echo Chambers: How Partisan Communication Took Over Congress (University of Chicago Press).
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Welcome to the podcast.
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
Hi Kevin, thank you so much for having me.
Kevin Kosar:
I was delighted when I saw your article on the Congressional Baseball Game, which was co-authored with my former colleague, Riley Millburne. What prompted you to take up this topic? I haven’t seen previous articles written by you about baseball or sports at all.
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
So this idea of and the question of collaboration is always in my mind.
When I worked with the Modernization Committee, we were really interested in the decline of “third spaces”—which is something you’ve also written about, that members don’t live in DC anymore and don’t do orientations together—and how this has had a negative effect on the institution. When I was with the Modernization Committee, we were brainstorming all these ideas. Do we need to create a members-only room> Do we need to reinforce bipartisan CODELs or off-camera meetings? And so these are all sorts of questions we had, but not really much we could do about it. They were ideas that didn’t have proof.
Fast forward a few years, and I am teaching my legislative politics class at the College of the Holy Cross, where Riley, at the time, was one of my students. And we had two guest speakers. We had Representative Tim Bishop, a Democrat from New York, and Representative Charles Boustany, a Republican from Louisiana—both former members. And when they logged onto Zoom for this Q&A with the class, they were so excited to see each other. So the conversation just naturally devolved into how they work together on various pieces of legislation. And it came out that they met each other playing on the congressional baseball team and on different teams—Republicans versus Democrats—but they played in the league together and that’s how they became friends. And then they worked together.
So after class, Riley and I were talking, and we were just so taken with that anecdote that we thought, ‘Let’s look into this. Is this just a one-off of friendly members of Congress getting along, or is there something more to it?’ And so then it also fed into my larger questions of how do we encourage collaboration. That’s where it started.
Kevin Kosar
For the sake of those readers who are not familiar with the Modernization Committee, I should mention that she’s referring to the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which is not to be confused with its successor, the Subcommittee on Modernization & Innovation, which works under the Committee on House Administration.
When were you with the Select Committee and in what capacity?
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
I was with them from 2019 to 2021, and I was an APSA Public Service Fellow. The American Political Science Association, which was involved in and invested in the success of the Modernization Committee, wanted some extra staffing help, and APSA said we could fund a scholar to help out. And so I was kind of just their Congress researcher, which then, as a PhD student, was the most exciting job getting to be back in Congress and researching Congress. It was a great experience, but yes, a lot of it was just about improving Congress, which includes improving relationships.
Kevin Kosar:
Yes, it’s hard to get anything done in Congress if you can’t produce a majority, and you can’t produce a majority if you don’t have other people’s trust.
In this article, what was the hypothesis that you tested or explored here?
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
So we wanted to see if participating in the Congressional Baseball Game—which happens once per year, but there are practices throughout the spring and summer—leads to collaboration. And there are many ways that we could have measured collaboration, but we decided to go with co-sponsorship—does playing in the baseball game change who you co-sponsor with, and maybe how many co-sponsors that you have?
Kevin Kosar:
And did you look at co-sponsorships like Democrats with Democrats or Republicans with Republicans, or were you looking at cross-party co-sponsorships of bills?
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
We looked at it all. We collected every single co-sponsorship that happened in a congressional session. And so we set this up as a network analysis, which allowed us to see how members’ behavior changes before and after they’re in the baseball league. Does their co-sponsorship change? Does it decrease? Most members co-sponsor with members of their own party. They have shared policy interests in all of this. But we were really hopeful and interested to see if there would be bipartisan co-sponsorships like the ones of Representative Bishop and Boustany.
And so we looked at participation in the baseball game. We also looked at other kinds of what we would assume to be common sources of co-sponsorship. Are they from the same state delegation? Do they share a demographic connection? Women tend to co-sponsor together more. There’s some research that shows they have this shared co-sponsorship relationship. Are they members of the same party? And are they in the same congressional class—did they enter Congress as freshmen together and thus form a bond within their coalition? So we looked at these understood and expected areas of collaboration and then added in the baseball team to look at this social aspect that is otherwise pretty hard to capture.
Kevin Kosar:
So, top-line results, what did you and Riley find?
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
So we looked at four congressional sessions, from the 114th through the 118th. There’s a baseball game every year, except for one during COVID in 2020, so that’s nine years of baseball games. We found that in all but one Congress, co-sponsorships within party increased pretty significantly, and bipartisan co-sponsorships increased. And it was statistically significant and substantively significant. The effect of serving together on a baseball team, whether you’re on the Democratic or Republican teams, increased your likelihood of co-sponsoring together more than having a shared demographic, more than being from the same state, and more than being from the same freshman year. To put it in an actual substantive term, if you are on the baseball team together, there’s about a 55% chance of you co-sponsoring with somebody else on the baseball team of either party; for the average member of Congress, the likelihood of co-sponsoring with someone else is about 40%, so it pushes it over the edge into positive likelihood. And that is consistent across congressional sessions.
It was a happy finding for us that this sort of fun volunteer event can lead to real substantive behavioral change.
Kevin Kosar:
You mentioned that the Congressional Baseball Game did not increase collaboration in one year. Do you have a hypothesis for that?
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
So the one instance is the 115th Congress, which is Trump’s first term, so it may have had something to do with that. But what was interesting about the 115th Congress is that no co-sponsorship variables—no other legislator variables—were significant, so something was going on in the 115th Congress where people were maybe grumpy with one another, and overall likelihood of co-sponsoring in general was down.
We didn’t have many expectations as to why, but we were happy that it wasn’t the COVID year, which is something else that could be explained away.
Kevin Kosar:
Were you surprised by any of what you found?
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
I was surprised that there were these findings. It’s not like a ton of members serve on the baseball team—maybe 40 people from each party at most—so it was surprising to see that 1) there was an effect, but 2) that it was so much stronger and substantively larger than other really common areas of collaboration, which we took to be that members do need to get out of the Capitol. They do need to be in a truly social setting, so even something like some of these other factors increasing your co-sponsorship (e.g., being from the same state)—those meetings are still happening in a House office building, usually under a kind of professionalized state caucus meeting.
So for them to be really removed—maybe not even have their staff around—and just hanging out and learning about one another, there’s something to talk about that’s personal, and it really breaks that ice in a way that’s not within the chamber. So I think it gave validation to this larger question that I started with and think about quite a bit as just a general fan of Congress. There is hope if we like encourage these social connections. Just the overall findings were surprising. And again, just the substantive effect, how much larger it was was quite surprising.
Kevin Kosar:
Yes, I think the context pretty clearly affects the behavior of individuals. We’re just multifaceted creatures, and those facets get tapped into in different contexts. I can absolutely believe this. And it’s interesting to me that we know that there’s a little gamesmanship with these baseball matches. If a younger member gets elected to Congress and seems to be athletic, there’s a push to get that guy on the team because otherwise the team is frequently guys who are 50/60 years old and pot-bellied and maybe not great at the sport. Yet it sounds like the results of the game improving collaboration doesn’t matter if the person was new to Congress, young, coming from particular states or an old grizzled veteran who has been there forever. It’s kind of everybody to some degree, generally was more collaborative.
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
Yeah, and Alison Craig has done some work on this; collaboration begets further collaboration. So these members meet each other on the baseball team, and they work together, but then they also introduce them to their friends and their networks already existing in Congress. We found not only did general connections of people who played on the baseball team increase, but we saw this exponential effect where, for example, if you play baseball together one year, you gain maybe three new co-sponsorship relationships, but then it becomes 10, and then it becomes 30, and it expands out. People who have written about co-sponsor relationships have seen that, but the question is, how do we break in? How do we start a new relationship? How do we tap into existing networks within Congress? And it could be something as simple as playing sports, so it’s another win for sports all around.
Kevin Kosar:
Do you think there’s another context in which this sort of thing is happening? You mentioned the CODELs earlier, and there has been some push in Congress to bring back members traveling to home districts together, but that’s usually a small number. It’s the members of a committee doing a district or state-based hearing, or it’s something like the Bipartisan Policy Center rigging up these two-member things, where one Republican goes to a Democrat’s home district, and then that Democrat goes to the Republican’s home district. None of these things is quite as big as the baseball game where you’re talking 40 players.
Is there anything similar to this that we might look to to see if it’s having any positive socialization, collaborative effects?
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
I think it could be interesting, and it’s worthwhile to think about what Congress looked like when orientations were done in a bipartisan manner. Now the two parties handle orientations for their own members. Several years ago, when I was in grad school, I was a note taker at a Congressional Research Service orientation. I don’t know if they do them anymore, but for that particular one, they would send the members out to Williamsburg. And so all the members had to ride on buses together and go down to Williamsburg. And they did the corny tours with the method actors of Thomas Jefferson, and would eat all their meals together. And these were all freshmen, so they’re going to have a bond anyway. But it was really interesting just observing, again, these members sharing, like talking about their kids, and not being in the Capitol and sharing meals.
Caucuses are a source of collaboration as well, and they can be on any policy issue. I’ve written some about what they can lead to, but as far as really getting out of the Capitol, maybe Congress should have more clubs. Maybe there should be more intramural sports. But most of the time, when we look at this question is looking at before and after—how is this Congress different from the before times and the after times? So it’s nice to be able to track something that’s consistently happening.
Kevin Kosar:
It’s interesting you mentioned orientation because in the last episode of this podcast, I was talking to Representative Stephanie Bice, who chairs the Subcommittee on Modernization. She told me that one of the first things she noticed when she got to Congress, not too many years ago, was that the initiation process didn’t feel like it worked. She didn’t feel like it was teaching them their jobs. And it also was not really fostering relationships between members. Admittedly, she did come when the Capitol was still under COVID restrictions. But you look at the structure of the way the orientation is run, it’s more about pouring content into the heads of new members than it is about setting them up to develop relationships that are going to be the basis for working together. I know that’s something that she’s been working on. So maybe I’ll double back to her and see if she’s got some plans about what to do.
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
Yes. Make it more summer camp and less policy briefings.
Kevin Kosar:
There we go. Summer camp.
Well, this has been fascinating, but we are out of time. So thank you, Professor SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor, for sharing your findings with us.
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor:
Thank you so much for having me, Kevin. This is great to talk about something positive, I think, that Congress is doing.
Kevin Kosar:
And before I sign off here, let me offer a reminder to listeners. The game this year is being played on June 10th at 7:05 pm ET, and last I checked, there were still some tickets available for purchase. This is an event you have got to go see in person. So listeners, go out and watch them play ball, and thank you for tuning in.
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on X and tagging @AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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