Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Mr. President By Richard Craig March 28, 1997

On Tuesday afternoon, Madeleine Albright will add two more items to the list of things she's been the first to accomplish. She will become the first woman -- and the first Secretary of State -- ever to throw out the presidential first pitch to open the Major League Baseball season.

But make no mistake about it -- if President Clinton weren't laid up with a bum knee, he'd be limbering up his throwing shoulder and practicing his curve ball right now. For Clinton and many of his predecessors, Opening Day has been a de facto national holiday.

Presidents (or occasionally substitutes, like Albright) have traditionally thrown out the first pitch of the baseball season -- a custom which began and continued for years when Washington had a major league team. After the Senators left town in 1972 and became the Texas Rangers, the ritual was eventually revived in nearby Baltimore, where Albright will appear on Tuesday. And while Clinton is a rabid baseball fan, many previous presidents were even more fanatical about the game.

According to the book Baseball: The Presidents' Game by William B. Mead and Paul Dickson, the first president to attend a major league game while in office was Benjamin Harrison, who watched the Washington Senators lose to Cincinnati on June 25, 1892. The first president to throw out the first pitch at a Washington opener was William Howard Taft, on April 14, 1910, and every president after him followed suit until 1972.

Taft was a huge fan in more ways than one -- he attended 14 games in his four years as president, and may have contributed to the history of the game in a unique way. According to legend, at one point during the 1910 Opening Day game, Taft got up from his seat, and the crowd, thinking the president was leaving, rose in unison to salute him. While there are lots of stories about the origins of the seventh-inning stretch, this one is the most fun to believe.

Over the years there have been many twists to the tradition. The ambidextrous Harry Truman, also a devoted fan, took to throwing out one ball with each hand. Richard Nixon, the only man to carry on the tradition as both vice president and president, was so knowledgeable about the game that in the mid-1960s, he achieved something unthinkable today. At different times, he was offered both the job of commissioner of baseball and director of the players association.

Presidents have often been on hand to inaugurate new stadiums as well. George Bush and his grandson both threw out first balls at the opening of Baltimore's Oriole Park at Camden Yards in 1992, while Clinton did the honors at the 1994 opening of Jacobs Field in Cleveland. And on an eerie note, in 1962 John Kennedy threw out the first ball at brand-new D.C. Stadium in Washington. The facility would later be renamed RFK Stadium in honor of his brother in 1969, after both men had been murdered.

In spite of this, the strangest convergence of coincidences in the history of presidential baseball occurred not at an Opening Day but at a World Series game. On October 1, 1932, president-to-be Franklin Roosevelt threw out the first pitch at a World Series game at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Seated next to FDR at that game was one of his staunchest political supporters, Chicago mayor Anton Cermak. Four months later in Miami, Cermak would be shot and killed in an assassination attempt on Roosevelt. But on that day, FDR and Cermak would take a back seat to Babe Ruth, who in the fifth inning "called his shot" in what became one of the most famous moments in baseball history.

While most presidents were fans first and foremost, several were actually accomplished ballplayers in their younger days. Most notably, George Bush was a star first baseman for Yale, captain of a team that went to the final game of the College World Series two consecutive years. Gerald Ford was a fine athlete and was a star of the annual congressional ballgame between the Democrats and Republicans for three decades. And while Ronald Reagan's nearsightedness prevented him from playing baseball, he was a well-known baseball announcer in the 1930s and portrayed baseball players in a number of movies in the 1940s and '50s.

While the Opening Day tradition did lose steam after the Senators bolted Washington, the three most recent presidents have helped renew the custom and establish Baltimore as the capital of presidential baseball. Yet there is one delicious final twist. Bush's son -- George W. Bush, the governor of Texas -- now owns the Texas Rangers, the very franchise that fled Washington and left it without a team 25 years ago.

In baseball, as in politics, what goes around comes around.

©1997 Richard Craig. All rights reserved.

Unsubstantiated Facts Column Archive