Before the Curse by Randy Roberts

Author:Randy Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252093364
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2012-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

13. Politics at the Park

On September 16, 1909, President William H. Taft, along with some 30,000 other baseball fans, watched the Chicago Cubs play their legendary rival the New York Giants. It was a fitting team for him to watch because in 1906 the president’s half-brother, Charles, had financed Cubs owner Charles Murphy’s purchase of the team.1 The game also marked an important moment in the long history that U.S. presidents, Taft in particular, share with baseball. Though he did not throw out the first pitch at this 1909 game, on opening day in 1910, at Washington D.C.’s Griffith Stadium, he became the first president to do so.

Some even give Taft credit for starting the tradition of the seventh-inning stretch, when, on that same opening day game in Washington, he stood up to stretch, only to see everybody else rise out of respect because they thought he was leaving. As legend has it, once people realized he was just getting the blood flowing, they did the same and the tradition was born. There is evidence, however, that the tradition stretches back to at least the very beginnings of professional baseball—to the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. In the following selection, in fact, we learn that, at the 1909 Cubs game that Taft attended, the president rose to his feet in the last half of the seventh as other Cubs fans were doing so, “for luck.”

Regardless of how much credit he deserves for the seventh-inning stretch, President Taft catalyzed the relationship between our nation’s highest office and baseball. Previous presidents did not ignore the game: to pass time, George Washington’s troops at Valley Forge played rounders; Abraham Lincoln played baseball; and Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was the first to invite ballplayers to the White House and to declare baseball “the national game.” But Taft took it to a new level.

After Taft the tradition continued. Dwight Eisenhower played semi-pro ball at West Point under a phony name. George H. W. Bush played first base at Yale. Ronald Reagan, of course, announced Cubs games. And few can forget the October strike that George Bush threw after 9/11 at Yankee Stadium during the Subway Series or the cheers and boos that he attracted throwing out the first pitch at a Washington Nationals game in 2005.2

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