When A President Throws The First Pitch
PLUS: GOING, GOING, GONE. WHERE ARE ALL THE MAGAZINES AND MEDIA GUIDES?
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Readers React
“Very good and interesting stuff ! Loved your remembrances…I’m going to work on a list of some of my unusual experiences. Met Chuck Mangione at Yankee Stadium. He let me play a couple notes on his horn. Petted Secretariat in his paddock in 1976. Had to do it quickly. He would bite..
I noticed the difference in the WAR of Mickey and Joe D. Did research on my own WAR. It’s a very deceptive and inaccurate metric. Typical of most stats that use an acronym. Holes in all of them
Enjoy reading the newsletter. Some real pearls in there to use if I were still in the booth.”
— Jim Kaat, Baseball Hall of Fame, Class of 2022
Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
After losing this season to a torn ACL Thursday, Rhys Hoskins — a free agent this fall — may never play for the Phillies again . . .
Good thing the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros share the same spring training facility, Ballpark of the Palm Beaches: Darren Baker, son of Houston manager Dusty Baker, is a minor-league infielder for the Nationals who doubles as his dad’s roommate . . .
Even though Trevor Bauer’s contract with Yokohama calls for $4 million (including incentives), he can make up to $26 million because of the guaranteed money left in his Los Angeles Dodgers deal now that his two-year suspension for domestic violence has been shortened by an arbitrator . . .
As the poster boy for their 2017 World Series sign-stealing scandal, Houston second baseman Jose Altuve won’t get much sympathy sitting on the sidelines two months with a broken thumb . . .
Buck Showalter won more games in one season than any Mets manager not named Davey Johnson . . .
Showalter has the names, faces, and affiliations of writers, broadcasters, beat writers, and staffers posted on a clubhouse wall so players know who’s interviewing them . . .
Steve Cohen of the New York Mets is paying some $100 million in luxury tax penalties but has managed to reach first place — in the ranking of team payrolls . . .
The last quartet of teammates to hit consecutive home runs were Nolan Arenado, Nolan Gorman, Juan Yepez, and Dylan Carson — an unlikey crew from the St. Louis Cardinals on July 2, 2022 . . .
Travis DeMeritte may never make it back to the major leagues but he’ll never forget his home run for the Braves on April 29, 2022: it was an inside-the-parker.
Leading Off
Presidential Ceremonial First Pitches
By Andrew C. Sharp
On March 30 at Nationals Park, we’ll find out if Joe Biden joins the list of Presidents who have opened the baseball season with a ceremonial first pitch. The tradition stretches back over a century.
On April 14, 1910, President William Howard Taft took a seat in the wooden stands of the ballpark that preceded what later became known as Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. After a bell rang, Taft got up and threw out a ceremonial pitch at the Senators’ home opener. Later in the same game, Taft rose from his seat, giving his ample body a comfortable stretch. Following the president, the crowd stood too, and the Seventh Inning Stretch was born. Or so the story goes.
Taft had attended a mid-season Senators game in 1909 and tossed another Opening Day pitch in 1911. He missed 1912 because a close adviser had died in the sinking of the Titanic days before.
Clark Griffith, in his first year as manager in Washington and the team’s largest stockholder, recognized the value of having a president attend Senators’ games. Midway through 1912, Griffith asked Taft if he’d throw out a ceremonial pitch again. The president, seeking re-election, gladly did. The Senators finished second that season, but Taft finished third in the fall presidential contest.
Before the start of the 1913 season, Griffith persuaded the new president, Woodrow Wilson, to follow Taft’s example and attend the opener to make the ceremonial pitch. Griffith soon would establish a presidential box behind the third-base dugout. He began going to the White House with great fanfare before each season to personally present the president with a golden pass.
Every president who followed Taft and Wilson threw out one or more season-opening pitches in D.C. as long as an American League team remained there, although the Senators opened several times on the road.
Franklin D. Roosevelt holds the record for most presidential first pitches. He went eight-for-nine beginning in 1933, his first year in office. He missed only 1939, when the Senators opened in Philadelphia. During his term, he also threw out the first pitch at World Series games in 1933 (the last for the Senators) and 1936 and at the 1937 All-Star Game, held in Washington.
“I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat,” Roosevelt told his fellow Americans in a 1933 radio speech. “What I seek is the highest possible batting average, not only for myself, but for my team.”
President Dwight D, Eisenhower tossed out seven opening-day pitches. The World War II hero grew up playing baseball and was a solid player. Eisenhower admitted years later that while he was at West Point he had been paid to play semi-professional baseball one summer under an assumed name.
The original American League Senators left for Minnesota after 1960, but the presidential openers remained in D.C. The expansion team had Opening Day in the A.L. to itself for 10 of the 11 seasons it remained in Washington, 1965 being the exception. Three other A.L. teams played that day.
John F. Kennedy was the last president to throw out a first pitch at Griffith Stadium -- for the expansion franchise in 1961. He did the same at the first game in the new D.C. Stadium and again on April 8, 1963 (I was in the crowd).
In 1969, at the renamed Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, Richard M. Nixon was the last president to make a season-opening pitch in D.C. for an A.L. game. Nixon threw ceremonial pitches to members of each team to start the 1970 All-Star Game in Cincinnati, the first ever played at night.
With the expansion Senators having left for Texas, Nixon threw out a first pitch on the Left Coast in April 1973, before an Angels’ game in Anaheim. The first-pitch practice continued off and on (mostly off) with Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton doing it at least once in various locations.
When baseball returned to Washington in 2005, so did the Presidential Opener, albeit after the new Nationals’ first road trip.
President George W. Bush threw out the first pitch – from the mound, unlike all the throws at the Senators’ openers at Griffith and RFK stadiums. Bush also did it in 2008 for the first game at brand-new Nationals Park. As a former owner of the Rangers, Bush clearly knew the game. He has thrown out numerous ceremonial first pitches at different ballparks both before and after he was president.
On the 100th anniversary of Taft’s first pitch, Barack Obama did the honors from the field at Nationals Park on Opening Day in 2010. Although he wore a Nationals warmup jacket, he didn't hide his true allegiance: he wore a White Sox cap.
Donald Trump didn’t throw out an Opening Day first pitch, although he had thrown out a first pitch at a Red Sox game in 2006 at Fenway Park. Trump’s one appearance as president at Nationals Park came in Game 5 of the 2019 World Series. Many in the crowd booed when Trump’s image appeared on the video board.
Biden didn’t throw out a season-opening pitch in 2021 or 2022. As vice president, he did it on Opening Day in 2009 at Baltimore’s Orioles Park at Camden Yards.
Andrew C. Sharp is a retired daily newspaper journalist and a SABR member who has written several dozen BioProject essays and Games Project stories as well as the team ownership histories of the original and expansion A.L. franchises. He blogs about D.C baseball at WashingtonBaseballHistory.com
Cleaning Up
Lamenting The Loss of Baseball Annuals and Media Guides
By Dan Schlossberg
For baseball purists like me, this is usually the happiest time on the baseball calendar.
Baseball magazines, filled with predictions, would proliferate at newsstands and bookstores, while team media guides, bulging with more stats and information than it’s possible to digest, would be there for the taking in big-league press boxes.
Now, thanks to the digital age, both have largely disappeared.
Major League Baseball’s Spring Training Guide and Media Information Guide are now online only, the same fate that has befallen most of the team media guides.
The St. Louis Cardinals, one of the last holdouts, are still planning to issue a print edition but they’re part of a dwindling minority. Even the New York Mets have gone digital.
It’s a disappointing development, since teams could raise extra revenue by selling media guides in team stores. Fans — and especially collectors — would surely scoop them up.
Going digital makes sense, in a way, because anything online can be updated. With so many free agents signing late and so many last-minute transactions marking the last weeks of spring training, digital guides make sense — to some degree.
But there’s no excuse for MLB not publishing printed versions of their Spring Training Guide, with maps and directions to all 30 training sites, or their Media Information Guide, a directory of contacts that includes both email addresses and phone numbers.
As an Old School guy, I like to read and to hold printed things in my hands.
I want box scores over breakfast and can’t find it on the computer or cell phone — not while I’m trying to handle a knife, fork, and coffee cup. That’s why I get mad when my morning newspaper doesn’t show up before 8.
Fortunately, I have a great collection of old media guides as well as such annuals as Street & Smith’s Official Baseball Yearbook, Athlon’s Baseball Preview, The Sporting News Yearbook, Lindy’s Baseball Magazine, and the old Bill Mazeroski’s Baseball, Baseball Illustrated, Sports Quarterly Baseball, and so many more. Even Major League Baseball and USA TODAY Sports Weekly issued one-shot baseball annuals.
Those were the days. Losing them is like losing old friends.
Former AP newsman Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ has written for all of the baseball annuals. He’s been covering baseball since 1969. E.mail him at ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia
Before Dusty Baker did it last year, only three major-league managers had 100-win seasons in both leagues . . .
Matt Carpenter, now a utilityman in San Diego, had two seven-RBI games for the Yankees last year . . .
Although SABR researcher Pete Palmer found errors in 1910 American League records that changed Ty Cobb’s hit total from 4,191 to 4,189 and lowered his lifetime average from .367 to .366, Major League Baseball never changed its records . . .
Unimaginable today: Cy Young not only had 511 wins but 749 complete games . . .
He’s on the “Legends of Baseball” stamp sheet issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 2000; there were 20 players on 33-cent stamps . . .
The first baseball stamp was a 1939 Baseball Centennial stamp with a value of three cents.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Brian Harl [bchrom831@gmail.com] handles Monday and Tuesday editions, Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] does Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com] edits the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HTP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.