By MARSHA MERCER
Novelist Henry James said the two most beautiful
words in the English language are summer afternoon. I’d say that on any summer
afternoon, the two words that bring joy and hope are “Play ball!”
What better escape from the bizarre
2016 presidential race and assorted national and international crises than an
afternoon or evening outside at the ball park? In August, we may dream about
October but we don’t fret. Much.
In the nation’s capital, baseball
comes with a side of presidential history. At other
major league ballparks, sausages or pierogies are racing mascots, but in Washington
it’s the Racing Presidents who compete in a fourth-inning sprint down the warning
track and foul line. They are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham
Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and, as of last month, Calvin
Coolidge.
Silent Cal seemed an odd addition to
the presidents, but he did attend 10 baseball games while he was in office from
1923 to 1929. He was the first president to attend a World Series opener and
the first to throw out a first pitch at a World Series game.
Coolidge didn’t lose an election in 30
years in politics, so he was thought lucky. Fans credited the “Coolidge luck”
with the Washington Senators’ winning two of their three pennants. They won the
1924 World Series and the American League championships in 1925, during his
tenure.
These
days, a president who ventures into a stadium may get booed. That’s what
happened when President Barack Obama threw out the first pitch of the season at
Nationals Park in 2010. What did he expect when he put on a Chicago White Sox
cap?
Coolidge wasn’t much of a baseball fan,
but his wife, first lady Grace Coolidge, was.
Called the “first lady of baseball,” she
kept a scorecard at games and when she couldn’t be there in person listened on
the radio. The Coolidges were in the stands at the first game of the 1924 World
Series, when the president decided it was time to go back to the White House. The
score was 2-2 in the ninth inning.
“When he rose to leave, the first
lady, resplendent in her `good luck’ necklace of seven ivory elephants,
snapped, `Where do you think you’re going? You sit down,’ seizing his coattails
to emphasize her point. Coolidge obeyed and stayed on to see the Giants win in
extra innings,” William Bushong, chief historian of the White House Historical
Association, writes in an essay.
Grace Coolidge told a presidential
historian that her husband never played baseball or any other sport, and “He
did not share my enthusiasm for baseball,” John Sayle Watterson reports in his
2009 book, “The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency.”
Watterson knocks Coolidge as “athletically
challenged,” the worst natural athlete in presidential history from 1901 to
2005.
The new focus on Coolidge and baseball
is the result of an unusual partnership. For the first time, the historical
association, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the White House and educating
the public, has joined in a multi-year agreement with a sports team, the
Nationals.
The 30th president is also the
subject of the association’s 2015 official Christmas ornament, which celebrates
Coolidge’s lighting in 1923 of the first national Christmas tree on the
Ellipse. The ornament is itself a Christmas tree with 14 decorations that
commemorate events in Coolidge’s life, including a baseball. An LED light is
incorporated in the design, another first.
Racing Presidents make personal
appearances outside the ball park, and Coolidge likely will be in demand. While
most
historians rank him among our worst presidents, blaming his policies for the
start of the Great Depression in 1929, Coolidge is the
darling of Tea Partiers and right-wing talkers, who love his disaffection for
big government and taxes.
Ronald Reagan put Coolidge’s portrait in the Oval
Office and praised his policies, and several books recently have tried to put
Coolidge’s policies in a better light.
Today’s Washington fans hope for a revival of the
Coolidge luck when they hear those magic words: “Play ball!”
©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
30
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