Nation’s First Fan Is No Bush Leaguer

Someone once said that in order to understand Americans, one must understand baseball. If that is the case, George W. Bush understands Americans better than any U.S. president in history.

With baseball as the litmus test, there is no question that the electoral college was correct in selecting Bush to the office he will assume during today’s inauguration in Washington.

On the campaign trail one day last year, his opponent, Al Gore, persisted in referring to Bruce Hornsby as Roger Hornsby. If the Democratic nominee was going to confuse the musician with the Hall of Fame second baseman, he could have at least gotten the name--Rogers Hornsby--right.

In the interest of fairness, it is imperative to point out that the Republican nominee in 1996, Bob Dole, on a campaign visit to the San Fernando Valley, called our local National League team the “Brooklyn Dodgers.”

In truth, it is probably not necessary to understand baseball in order to understand Americans or become president. But neither has it proved an impediment to reaching the White House.

William Howard Taft, who began the presidential tradition of throwing out the first pitch on opening day of the 1910 season, was a power-hitting catcher set to play for the Washington Nationals of the National Assn., before blowing out his arm.

Woodrow Wilson and Dwight D. Eisenhower played semi-pro baseball, the latter, probably coincidentally, under the name of Wilson so as not to jeopardize his college football eligibility at West Point.

George W.’s father, George Herbert Walker Bush, played first base for Yale. Ronald Reagan broadcast Chicago Cub games from a Teletype machine for a radio station in Des Moines. Richard Nixon at one point wanted to be a sportswriter. Franklin D. Roosevelt bet on games.

But no president before George W. Bush has ever been an owner of a major league team as he was with the Texas Rangers from 1989-98.

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Fourteen Things You Should Know About George W. Bush and Baseball:

1. He inherited his interest in baseball. His great-uncle, George Herbert Walker, owned 6% of the New York Mets when they became a franchise in 1960 and had dogs named “Metsie” and “Yogi.”

2. His favorite movie is “Field of Dreams.” He cried when he saw it for the first time because it reminded him of playing catch in the backyard in Midland, Texas, with his father. George W. says he considered it a rite of passage when his father stopped holding back on his throws.

3. He played varsity baseball and basketball in prep school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. But he was best known in Andover as head cheerleader, something he did not tell his friends in Texas for years because cheerleading there at the high school level was strictly for girls.

4. George W. became front man for a group that bought the Rangers in 1989 for $83 million. He invested $640,000, a third of his total wealth then.

5. Wearing a Ranger jacket, his mother, Barbara, who still has the scorecards she kept from his Little League games in Midland, threw out the first pitch on opening night in Arlington.

6. He told the media that he was in charge of “hats and bats,” a barb directed at Jerry Jones, who announced upon becoming owner of the Cowboys a month earlier that he would be in charge of “jocks and socks” and then fired local icon Tom Landry. George W. did nothing so dastardly, although he did trade Sammy Sosa along with Scott Fletcher and Wilson Alvarez in July 1989 to the Chicago White Sox for Harold Baines and Fred Manrique.

7. He did not sit inside a luxury box at games, preferring a seat near the Rangers’ dugout. He once said that the only poll he took before running for governor of Texas in 1994 was of fans who stopped at his seat to complain about the state of the state. Sometimes, they also complained about the state of the Rangers. A fan one night was so persistent in yelling, “George, more pitching,” that Bush invited him to sit beside him. The man half-apologized for becoming a nuisance. George W. half-apologized for the pitching.

8. One sweltering night, then-commissioner Fay Vincent, sitting next to Bush, became increasingly uncomfortable as the game dragged into extra innings. George W. called over first baseman Rafael Palmeiro from the on-deck circle and said: “The commissioner is really tired. Will you get us the hell out of here?” Palmeiro hit a home run to end the game.

9. George W. is a traditionalist, who, as the team’s representative to owners’ meetings, voted against expanding the playoffs to include wild-card teams. “You build a team to win a 162-game marathon, not to get lucky in a five-game playoff series,” he said. He also voted against interleague play. His standard speech when asked to speak at college graduations dwells on essential truths, which he calls “fixed stars.” His fourth star: “Baseball should always be played outdoors, on grass, with wooden bats.”

10. Before one game, George W. and two other investors changed into swimsuits and tennis shoes and shagged fly balls.

11. Three years after the nation was reading George Bush’s lips as he declared, “No new taxes,” his son and other Ranger investors persuaded voters in Arlington to overwhelmingly pass a sales-tax increase contributing $135 million toward a new $191-million stadium. Controversy arose after George W.’s group had 13 acres of private property condemned for the ballpark site. Four years later, as governor, Bush signed the state’s first law declaring the sanctity of private property.

12. Largely because of the new ballpark, George W.’s group was able to sell the Rangers in 1998 to Tom Hicks for $250 million. George W. received $15.4 million, substantial seed money for his campaign war chest.

13. One of his theme songs on the campaign trail was John Fogerty’s “Centerfield.”

14. Recently transferred from his office in the governor’s mansion to Washington was his collection of 250 autographed baseballs. One recent article snidely pointed out that he had half as many books. But it should be pointed out that he read one of them during the period between Election Day and the electoral college vote--the new biography of Joe DiMaggio.

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Although George W. relinquished his day-to-day operation of the Rangers in 1994 and his financial interest four years later, he remains a fan. Sometimes during baseball seasons, he wears a watch with an electronic device that updates him on the Rangers’ score.

An outspoken critic of rapidly increasing baseball payrolls, he must have cringed when Hicks paid more for Alex Rodriguez than he paid for the franchise. George W. never would have paid that much for one player. As his father would have advised him, “It wouldn’t be prudent.”

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Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com.