Obama Throws First Pitch, Cannot Name One Player From His Favorite Team

In 1954 the New York Giants swept the World Series from the vaunted Cleveland Indians in four games. By that time I had fallen in love with the game of baseball – then the National Pastime. I was seven years old. Willie Mays made a spectacular, over-the-shoulder catch of a ball hit by Indians first baseman Vic Wertz to deep center field at the Polo Grounds. It is one of the greatest plays ever filmed. Dusty Rhodes, a left-handed pinch-hitter for the giants, hit three home runs in that Series. He became a hero of mine – until I heard my dad talking about Mickey Mantle.

In 1956 I was nine. My father took us one warm Spring night in May to see the New York Yankees play against the Indians at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland. Mickey Mantle (pictured above on Time magazine cover) hit two home runs that night, one against the Indians’ starting pitcher Bob Lemon, and the second one against the great Hall of Famer Bob Feller. The first homer went so high that we temporarily lost sight of it as it soared above the stadium lights before it landed about twenty rows back in the right field seats. I can still name the starting lineups for both teams, and for several of my favorite major league teams thereafter.

Yesterday President Barack Obama, who claims to have become a Chicago White Sox fan when he moved there in the 1980s, (click the next link for the video and subsequent audio) threw out the first pitch in Washington, D.C. – then went to the broadcast booth for an interview. Asked by the announcer to name one of his favorite White Sox players, Obama dodged the question.

Reagan’s most remembered hour as a baseball broadcaster, of course, was the day he was recreating a Cub.

Yes, Reagan is a legend in Des Moines, Iowa due largely to his brief stint at WHO (which broadcasts through one of the nations most powerful transmittors).

I grew up in Des Moines, as did my father. My Grandfather owned a radio repair shop in Des Moines and knew Dutch Reagan since both of them ate at the same diner for lunch. One day Reagan announced to my grandad that he was covering a Cubs game in California (don’t ask me which team they played back then). He later received a postcard from Reagan informing Grandpa that he was offered a screen test. The rest you know.

I guess all that phony broadcasting at WHO made him a pretty good actor!

I never blamed Bill Buckner for the 1986 series error. The Red Sox could have still come back and won the 7th game. Instead the choked.

I didn't (and still don't) call it a choke. What it came down to was something Mets infielder Wally Backman said for a Sports Illustrated wrapup: I wouldn't have said this before the World Series, but we knew that if we could get into their bullpen it was no contest. Bruce Hurst running out of petrol in the tank at last midway through Game Seven was the key: the Mets could get into the far less effective Boston bullpen.

I always thought the Red Sox fans were a bunch of ungrateful snots for riding him so hard over a common error considering they likely would never have been there in the first place without Buckner's work ethic.

Those fans were a small minority. Most of the fans actually treated him kindly on the field until he was dealt away. It will always be the assholes who ruin it among any group of fans. Assholes such as the ones who finally drove Buckner to move out of New England after his playing days, the ones whose comments stuck in his youngest son's head when, playing catch with Dad one day, a ball sailed past Dad and the son, trying to be sympathetic as seven-year-olds will do, said nonchalantly, "That's OK, Dad. I know you have trouble with grounders."

Which is why Curt Schilling should go down forever as a class act, when the Red Sox won the 2004 World Series and Schilling said after the game that, so far as he was concerned, Buckner and every previously-denied Red Sox were champions in his book.

I first became a baseball fan as a youngster just as our local Minnesota Twins had their first World Series the following year and couldn't understand why Mickey Mantle got more praise than our hometown boy Roger Maris.

I could. By the time they came around to 1961, Mickey Mantle had learned at last how to work it with the public and the press and was pretty quick with a quip and with the glib tongue. Roger Maris wasn't that glib. Where the timing comes in is that Maris became, arguably, baseball's first player to challenge any sort of hallowed record as televison was really coming into his own, and because he was ill at ease in public by nature and not glib of tongue, spoke short and blunt, people got the wrong impression of him. It didn't help that then-Commissioner Ford Frick tried to jerry-rig the whole thing and make it seem as though even thinking about breaking ruthsrecord (so help me God people tended to say it that way then) was tantamount to heresy. Maris was awkward and shy, except around kids (he had a habit of answering only the fan mail he knew to be written by children during the Ruth chase), and he didn't have the innate ability similarly reserved men (Sandy Koufax, for one) had of making a comfortable accommodation between public and private.

Add to the mix such factors as Yankee co-owner Dan Topping trying actively to interfere with Ralph Houk's lineup making in a bid to favour Mantle for the home run chase, and you had what amounted to the question Billy Crystal put into Roger Maris's mouth in 61*: "Why can't people make room for two heroes?"

The single most ridiculous factor in the whole shebang: The idiot brigades who said aloud that only a "true" Yankee should have the right (a right, mind you) to even think about breaking Babe Ruth's record. Oh. Like the "true" Yankee---you know, the one developed and then sold by the Red Sox---who set it in the first place.

The second most ridiculous: That it had to be broken in a "legitimate" 154-game span to be "legitimate," and that Ford Frick wasn't the only one to say it. Oh. Like the record Ruth broke in the first place, in 1919---a record first set in, what do you know, a 121-game season. Just try to imagine baseball's then-governing body (it didn't take on a Commissioner until the wake of the Black Sox scandal) telling Babe Ruth that his 1919 record of 29 bombs was "illegitimate" because he didn't hit number 29 in 121 games.

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