Decades of Bipartisan Support : Nixon’s Yorba Linda Exhibit Explores Long Love Affair Between Presidents and Baseball

In the spring of 1930, a New York writer criticized Yankee star Babe Ruth for holding out for an $80,000 salary while many of Ruth’s fans were standing in bread lines.

After all, the writer said, President Herbert Hoover made only $75,000.

“Yeah,” Ruth replied, “but I had a better year than he did.”

Another time, Ruth declined to be photographed with Hoover, then a Presidential candidate. After all, Ruth said, the game was about to start.

Priority has its place when it comes to politics, Presidents and baseball. Most Presidents have loved the game, which is saying a lot since most of them had the unfortunate duty of rooting for the hapless Washington Senators, who left the capital for good in 1972.

There was at least one President who played semi-professionally, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and a few who thought they were on their way to the big leagues until destiny called a different play.

But for the most part, Presidential involvement in a sport that has its own government is limited to the ceremonial throwing of the first ball on opening day, an opportunity some Presidents maximized.

Lyndon B. Johnson, a hard-throwing former first baseman, disdained the traditional lob in favor of a fastball. He was even accused of throwing a spitter. And on one occasion, Harry S. Truman threw a spitter that became known as “The Great Expectoration.”

William Howard Taft began the tradition when he threw out the first pitch at the 1910 opener between the Senators and the Philadelphia Athletics.

Now, Richard Nixon has brought this baseball lore together in a special exhibit combining baseball memorabilia and Presidents at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda.

Nixon, who resigned from the Presidency in 1974 under threat of impeachment but was later pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford--seemingly had no aspirations to play in the majors. Indeed, he once said that if he had life to live over again he would be, of all things, a sportswriter.

After Nixon had lost the Presidential election in 1960 to John F. Kennedy, representatives of major league baseball asked him if he was interested in being baseball commissioner. Nixon said he had other things in mind.

In 1972, Nixon and son-in-law David Eisenhower picked their all-time all-star teams. This year, they are updating their lists and have asked the public to guess their picks. Nixon’s selections will be announced at a luncheon at his library July 15.

During his Presidency and since, Nixon has often written to players and has always had a special feeling for those in batting slumps. In June of 1971, when the headlines were of inflation and the Vietnam War, Nixon wrote Red Sox shortstop Luis Aparicio a line of congratulations after he ended his string of 44 at-bats without a hit:

“In my own career I have experienced long periods when I couldn’t seem to get a hit, regardless of how hard I tried, but in the end I was able to hit a home run,” Nixon wrote.

That letter is among many on display at the library. So is a letter that President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, urging team owners to keep the sport going during World War II.

Roosevelt, a polio victim, loved the game and once told owner Clark Griffith of the Senators: “If I didn’t have to hobble up those steps in front of all these people, I’d be out at the ballpark every day.”

Roosevelt opened eight seasons for the Senators by throwing out the first ball, one time throwing so wildly that he hit a photographer. Roosevelt was also known to occasionally bet on games, but said being a Senator fan drove him to it. He said that a President saddled with having to root for the Senators was entitled to a little action on the side to relieve the sting.

William Howard Taft was a big, power-hitting catcher as a teen-ager and almost became a professional ballplayer. Playing for his neighborhood team in Cincinnati, he caught the eye of a scout who offered him a chance to play for the Washington Nationals, one of the 10 charter teams of the National Assn., the first baseball league formed in 1871. Taft’s father objected, but Taft decided to join the team anyway.

But the day Taft was to leave for Washington, his home team needed him to pitch. Lore has it that Taft threw so hard that day that he injured his arm. Taft went on to become President and, later, chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Woodrow Wilson, who “threw pure smoke” according to one scout who saw him pitch at Princeton, played semipro ball in Virginia and later coached at Princeton. In 1915 he became the first President to attend a World Series.

Even after Wilson left the White House, where he had been partially paralyzed by a stroke during his second term, he continued to attend Senator games. His car was driven directly onto the field and parked along the right-field foul line. A player was posted nearby to keep foul balls from denting the fenders.

Warren G. Harding was a big fan of the Senators, too. Once, when he was running for President, he kept a roomful of powerful local politicians waiting while he talked with a baseball reporter, Thomas Rice of the Sporting News.

Rice later wrote: “(Harding) was the sort that gloomed and did not enjoy his supper at the White House if he had seen the Washington team lose. On the contrary, he felt it was a pretty good world, and things would soon come out all right in Europe or elsewhere if he had seen the Senators win.”

Calvin Coolidge was neither an athlete nor a fan, often slipping out of Senator games early. But Mrs. Coolidge enjoyed baseball, often staying after her husband had left, scoring the games. She had been an official scorer while attending Vassar College.

Truman also had little interest in baseball, but he was a favorite of photographers when he threw out the first ball. Sometimes he threw it left-handed, other times right-handed. And once, he used both hands.

Even before Eisenhower played halfback at West Point around 1910, he played semipro baseball in the old Kansas State League under the name of “Wilson” so that his college eligibility would not be endangered. Still, the President’s former prowess escaped him one day when he beaned an umpire while throwing out the first ball.

Kennedy once introduced himself to Stan Musial in 1960, saying: “They tell me you’re too old to play ball and I’m too young to be President. Maybe we’ll fool them.”

Three years later, Musial visited Kennedy at the All-Star game, this time in Kennedy’s Presidential box. “I guess we fooled them,” Musial said.

Of the accusation that Johnson once threw a spitter during first-ball ceremonies, a former Senate colleague said: “If Lyndon was throwing a spitter, you can bet he was using someone else’s saliva. Lyndon never gave away anything, except maybe the space center to Houston.”

As a sports announcer at a station in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1930s, Ronald Reagan took telegraph reports of the action at Chicago Cub games and transformed them into play-by-play commentaries, relying on recordings for the sounds of the ball hitting the bat and crowd noise. It was while finally observing the Cubs in person during a spring training camp in Los Angeles that he arranged for a Hollywood screen test.

And President George Bush, as first baseman and captain of the Yale team, reached the NCAA finals two consecutive years, 1947 and ‘48, with batting averages of .239 and .264, respectively.

There is one common tradition in the games of baseball and politics and Roosevelt pointed it out in a letter he wrote to baseball officials at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1939.

“Baseball has become, through the years, not only a great national sport, but also the symbol of America as the melting pot,” he said.

“The players embrace all nations and natural origins and the fans, equally cosmopolitan, make only one demand on them:

“ ‘Can they play the game?’ ”

For fans of baseball or Presidents, not much has changed.