A Retired MLB Player’s Hilarious, Substance-Free Run for Senate as a Republican

Steve Garvey, a former Major League Baseball MVP and World Series champion, is technically running for office, hoping to win the California Senate seat previously held by Dianne Feinstein.

By “technically,” I mean the 75-year-old—who had a lengthy career with the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres—has filed all the necessary paperwork, is making campaign stops, and qualified for (and then competed in) a debate last month against other front-runners for the seat.

The problem is that his platform could best be described as “nothing,” or perhaps “empty head, no thoughts.” He’s so far eschewed policy prescriptions, taking positions, or even more generally, sharing political opinions. He’s in the midst of a historically substanceless campaign —a run so lazy, so devoid of meaning or purpose, that it’s inherently newsworthy no matter how it ends.

“I have nothing that’s truly etched in stone, except what is truly right,” Garvey said of his own ideology at the late-January debate hosted by Politico. “As I think President Lincoln said one time, ‘I will stand with those who are right, I will walk away from those I don’t agree with.’ ” (Lincoln almost certainly did not say this.)

On name recognition alone, Garvey is polling in the mid- to high teens, sometimes in second place. He’s running as a Republican and has referred to himself as a “conservative moderate,” the closest he’s gotten to defining his own ideology. He’s otherwise dipped and dodged around queries about his beliefs. At the debate, for instance, he was asked which planks of the Republican Party he disagreed with; he responded, “Just about everything.” When the moderator asked him to expound on that surprising stance, he immediately backed off and resorted to platitudes.

Garvey isn’t going to win a Senate seat in a deep-blue state. Who knows? Maybe that’s why he’s running. A little round of publicity, and the sweet security of knowing you’ll never actually have to legislate on behalf of 39 million people. But it’s plausible that he could make it to the general election, thanks to disaffected California conservatives begging for an opportunity to cast a semi-meaningful vote. That would mean knocking out two of his Democratic Party competitors—Reps. Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, or Barbara Lee—on March 5, aka Super Tuesday. (California has a top-two open primary; the top two candidates advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation.)

If Garvey does advance, it would essentially ensure that a centrist like Schiff would win the general election for the Senate seat—a coup for the old-guard Democratic moderates like Nancy Pelosi, and a frustrating miss for progressives hoping to shift Feinstein’s old seat at least slightly to the left.

Schiff, who’s currently narrowly leading in the polls and has a truly gigantic amount of money behind him, seems to be aware of his golden opportunity. As recently as last week, he was running ads singularly focused on Garvey—a clever way to box out his Democratic competitors and give the appearance of a traditional two-person race, Democrat versus Republican. I do not think Garvey, on the other hand, is considering the implications of his run. He’s just glad to be here!

The retired baseball player’s political coronation, his actual opportunity to assume office, was supposed to have happened decades ago, when he retired from MLB. Garvey has talked about it openly, in fact, telling Playboy in the ’80s: “either I start at the U.S. Senate or nothing.” Then a number of embarrassing extramarital affairs spilled out into the public (the Los Angeles Times just published a thorough update on Garvey’s still-messy personal life), and he sort of settled into the former professional athlete pipeline of endorsing a bunch of random stuff, including bunk diet pills, which got him in hot water with the Federal Trade Commission. More recently, he’s promoted  Lucy Pet Products, Tommy Bahama, King’s Hawaiian, and Level Select CBD on his social media. And yes, he’s had a Cameo stint.

Rumors of Garvey’s entry into this Senate race—his last, best chance at satiating a bucket-list item—were first reported in June, with an announcement expected weeks later. It ultimately took Garvey until Oct. 10 to actually declare his candidacy. In early December, Politico reported that Garvey had yet to make a single public appearance as a candidate, nor had his team conveyed any fundraising numbers. (We’ve since learned he’s not raising nearly enough money.) In late December, a Cal Matters headline captured Garvey’s glacial approach: “Steve Garvey Starts Campaigning for U.S. Senate, Sort Of.”

In the lead-up to the late January debate, Garvey belatedly let a Politico reporter embed with him. Big mistake. Politico relayed how Garvey loves to sign baseballs and make the same joke to couples he meets on the campaign trail (Is this your daughter? What! That’s your wife? No way!) but tenses up when he’s asked about anything relevant to the job at hand. Yes, he voted for Donald Trump twice, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Would he accept a Trump endorsement? It’s impossible to imagine such a scenario, he claims.

In the same Politico profile, another reporter tossed Garvey the softest of softballs: What is the government doing that’s not working? “I’ll find that out,” was his reply. Later, Garvey was asked about California’s homelessness crisis. He repeatedly told reporters he’s still working on his rough draft for solving that problem. “Once we get through the primary, we’ll start a deeper dive into that,” he said. “I haven’t been at this very long, so you’ve got to give me a bit of leeway here.”

At the debate, Schiff, Porter, and Lee took turns beating up on Garvey, who mailed in a stunningly off-kilter performance. At one point, Garvey proclaimed that the person who shaped him most, besides his family, is Ronald Reagan. I believe him: Garvey’s affect is best described as President Reagan having just been awakened from a nap. Garvey rated the economy a perfectly unimpeachable 5 out of 10. He asked the Democrats on stage about the last time they visited the “inner city.” He attempted to call Schiff—who was censured by House Republicans in June 2023—a liar, but delivered the clearly rehearsed barb with the conviction of an unwilling participant in a murder-mystery game.

The highlight of the debate was when one of the moderators asked why Garvey got in the race “if you don’t know where you stand on these issues.”

He responded, as if he had just returned from safari: “I have said that I’m new, I needed to explore California, I needed to talk to the people.” He added: “Policy for me is position. I’ve taken strong positions, especially on the homeless and what should be done. We should do a strong audit on that. I’ve talked about the economy and inflation. Rapid spending. Let’s get back to energy that’s affordable. I’ve talked about the border, the crisis at the border. Let’s close the border. Let’s take a deep breath. We have a pathway to citizenship. Let’s enforce it. Crime. Let’s get crime off the streets. Let’s fund the police. Let’s make sure that they keep our neighborhoods and communities safe. I mean, that’s policy. But it’s my position. And by tomorrow, you’ll see a lot more.”

Garvey soon demonstrated what he meant by “a lot more.” According to Web Archive, the “Steve’s Vision” page of Garvey’s campaign website previously featured short blurbs about how he would address “education,” “quality of life,” “public safety,” “national security,” “homelessness,” and “small business.”

After the debate, “Steve’s Vision” was updated with several more short blurbs and some bolded words. The homelessness section now included a sentence about “auditing the money that has been spent on this crisis so far,” to be conducted only after Garvey has been elected to the Senate. Another tweak: updating the “education” header to “elevating our education system.” Also, a radical idea: “We need to ensure that our students are graduating with the right grade level skills of the 4 R’s: reading, writing, arithmetic, and reasoning.” The public safety blurb was also expanded to clarify that Garvey supports “more training, better resources, and effective crime prevention strategies.”

One of the few positions Garvey has actually articulated—both in the debate and on his website—is that he unequivocally supports Israel and does not back a cease-fire in Gaza. But also on this, he manages to make it weird. “According to Politico, the Israel-Hamas conflict has emerged as a pivotal issue in this US Senate race, highlighting significant differences in perspectives among the candidates,” his site reads. Hmm. Yes. But why “according to Politico?” Is this a book report? (It should also be noted that Garvey’s stance on Israel is almost indistinguishable from Schiff’s.)

Perhaps cognizant that he needs to sleepwalk through a couple more interviews before the primary on March 5, Garvey has subjected himself to short TV segments of late. During a Jan. 26 appearance on NewsNation, he was pressed about his reticence to back Trump or Nikki Haley, to which he again stonewalled. Then the NewsNation host asked Garvey what he would do at the border. Garvey’s brilliant plan, as he expressed it to a very confused-looking host, was, “Well, let’s just shut it down.”

There are obvious comparisons to be made between Garvey and Trump, given that Garvey is a celebrity-turned-politician basking in the limelight, coasting along on a policyless campaign. But those comparisons are too simplified. Trump does express opinions. He does have a platform. He has an entire movement—one that Garvey, by virtue of the state he’s running in, feels as though he can’t embrace.

As a result, Garvey is isolated, halfheartedly trying to thread an impossibly small needle. He’s hoping to convince California’s MAGA followers to back him without isolating the millions of other Californians who find Trump revolting. It’s the rare reversal of an all-too-common sight: a Democrat in a purple or red state doing way too much triangulation to appease a real or imagined voter.

Garvey, like many of those same candidates, is going to lose. The question is whether, on March 5, his remarkably vapid campaign takes a few California Democrats down with him.