The season opening home game for the Washington Nationals will take place Monday afternoon and last week media outlets were full of outrage over how President Donald Trump, by declining the team’s invitation to throw out the first pitch, was breaking a century-old “baseball tradition.” But as Washington Post “D.C. Sports Bog” reporter Dan Steinberg pointed out in calling out his journalistic brethren: “It isn’t true. It’s news that is fake. Trump is not breaking a 100-year-old baseball tradition.”
In his post, which ran in Thursday’s newspaper, he cited several online articles, including this false March 28 Yahoo headline: “Trump breaks 107-year-old Opening Day first pitch presidential tradition.”
Scanning television, I caught this farce from a disgusted Mika Brzezinski on the March 29 Morning Joe: “William Howard Taft threw out the ceremonial first pitch in Washington, D.C., for the Senators on opening day in 1910, sparking new custom that thirteen future presidents, including George W. Bush and Barack Obama would partake in. Donald Trump will not be the 14th. Nah. He doesn’t want to look awkward in any way.”
That night on CBS’s Late Show, Stephen Colbert offered this biting commentary disguised as a supposed joke: “Now this is true. Since Taft, every President, other than Jimmy Carter, has thrown out the first pitch of the season opener. For God’s sake, that means FDR did it! Let that sink in!...What presidential tradition will Trump abandon next?”
No, that is not true. And Steinberg didn’t have to go back to FDR to disprove the anti-Trump fake news. Just to the previous President:
“Please recall: In 2009, then-President Obama was invited to throw out the first pitch before the Nats home opener against the Phillies, a game everyone from Philadelphia was also invited to attend. Obama declined. From The Post: ‘President Obama has turned down an invitation to throw the ceremonial first pitch at the home opener of the Washington Nationals against the Philadelphia Phillies on Monday. Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, said today that Obama, who returned from an eight-day overseas trip this week and is planning to leave for Mexico and Trinidad next week, would not be doing the honors.’”
In fact, Steinberg noted, Obama “only threw out one Nats first pitch during his eight years in office.”
The District of Columbia didn’t have a major league baseball team from 1972 to 2004, so Presidents had to go to other cities, though, Steinberg recalled, “they were already irregular by the end of the last century. Bill Clinton did first-pitch honors several times, including in Baltimore. Ditto for the elder George Bush. But Ronald Reagan, according to Baseball Almanac, did not throw out a first pitch until April 1984 — his fourth chance.”
“The last president to throw out a first pitch in Washington in his first post-election spring,” Steinberg observed, “was Richard Nixon — in 1969. That was 48 years ago! That’s almost half the length of this supposed 100-year-old tradition!”
