With presidents at the top of the order, fans' embrace of the national pastime is captured in 'Baseball as America' exhibit at Smithsonian.
Byline: Jonathan Pitts
Source: SUN STAFF
Published on Saturday, April 3, 2004
Section: TODAY Page: 1D
Edition: FINAL
© The Baltimore Sun
WASHINGTON - Maybe it's his affection for U.S. history. Maybe it's that he spent the previous afternoon schmoozing with an old pal in the Oval Office. Whatever the reason, when Dale Petroskey, the president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., is asked to name his favorite installation in Baseball as America, the sprawling exhibition that opens at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History
today, he's on it like Bonds on a hanging curve.
He walks past the Abner Doubleday baseball, which, at 150 years old, looks something like a shrunken head. Past the warm-up jacket once worn by Moe Berg, the catcher who, some say, spied on military installations during a barnstorming tour of Japan in 1934. Past the bat carved from a tree limb by an American POW in a German prison camp in 1942.
He stops in front of a glass case under a sign that reads "Fan-in-Chief." Inside are a row of baseballs signed by presidents from William H. Taft (April 1910) through Petroskey's pal, George W. Bush (October 2001); a scorecard from Washington's old Griffith Stadium, filled in by Dwight Eisenhower, and a seat from that ballpark that was once reserved for chief executives.
He stoops to eyeball an old program, perfectly preserved. On the cover, a man in a tightly buttoned suit tosses a ball from a packed grandstand. "`A big enough boy to enjoy the national game,'" Petroskey reads, his voice as earnest as a schoolboy's, "`and a man big enough to guide our country through its greatest crisis.' That's President [Woodrow] Wilson, throwing out the first pitch at the 1916 World Series."
Petroskey, 47, looks up. "Baseball and presidents," he says with a safe-at-home smile. "They're intertwined. Through history, they've shaped one another. They still do."
The same could be said for America and its national pastime. That's more or less the theme of Baseball as America, an exhibition of 500 artifacts from the Hall of Fame whose Washington opening coincides with Opening Day 2004 (scheduled for tomorrow night at Camden Yards, weather permitting). "It's the first time [a collection] of our treasures have ever left their home" in Cooperstown, says the Hall of Fame's chairman, Jane Forbes Clark, whose grandfather, Stephen C. Clark, founded the place in 1939. Washington, which presents the show through Sept. 30, is the sixth stop in a 10-city tour.
At an opening ceremony this week, Hall of Famers such as pitching legend Bob Feller, 85 (elected 1962), Negro League and major league superstar Monte Irvin, 85 (1973), Oriole icon Brooks Robinson, 66 (1983), and Cuban-born Cincinnati Reds great Tony Perez, 61 (2000), were among 20 legends who grace an auditorium stage. They personify the words on a placard in the show. "The history of American freedom," reads a sign in a display called "Ideals and Injustices," which is complex. That complexity is starkly visible when America is viewed through the prism of baseball."
Feller, an Iowan, pitched his first game at age 17 and won 266 in an 18-year career despite serving four years in the Navy during World War II. Irvin, a longtime Newark Eagles star, crossed the color line in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson did the same, helping the New York Giants win two pennants. Robinson, a native Arkansan, was one of the first to be inducted largely on the strength of his defense; Perez, whose last job before big-league ball was in a Havana sugar-cane factory, made his mark as a clutch RBI man.
`Makes it better'
They bear out the free-market philosophy of the first ex-Little Leaguer elected to the Oval Office. "Any time you can add new blood and competition to the game," said Bush, who was managing general partner of the Texas Rangers from 1989-1994, "it makes it better, and it also helps our society understand people with different cultures."
Baseball's growing diversity, including its sometimes reluctant progress in the area of race, is just one of the seven themes Baseball as America explores. Another, "Invention and Ingenuity," includes an inflatable chest protector from 1884, a cup-tipped bat used by Hall of Famer Johnny Bench, the cleats of base-stealing king Rickey Henderson, and a Red Barber microphone.
"Weaving Myths" displays artifacts that helped turn players like Ty Cobb (shoes), Babe Ruth (Bunyanesque 56-oz. bat), Willie Mays (sheet music to "Say Hey, Willie Mays") and Ted Williams (a lookalike GI Joe) into larger-than-life characters. "Sharing a Common Culture" uses books (Casey at the Bat, 1912), games (Strat-O-Matic Baseball) and artifacts (the "Wonderboy" bat from the film The Natural) to show how baseball seeps into the nation's consciousness.
Nowhere, though, is Petroskey more excited to think about the meaning of the game than in "Our National Spirit," including its display on chief executives-and its focus on moments when baseball helped the nation through its darkest hours.
You can learn a lot about presidents from their pitches. Taft made the first-ever Opening Day toss when he rose from a seat specifically designed to accommodate his 300-pound bulk and found his target, the glove of Washington Senator Walter "Big Train" Johnson - who played before more different presidents than any other player. Herbert Hoover, a boyhood shortstop, triggered Depression-era boos just entering the ballpark. Franklin D. Roosevelt threw out more first pitches than any president, and Harry S. Truman, not content with his status as the first left-handed First Tosser in 1946, threw out two pitches - one with each hand - at Griffith Stadium in 1950. Eisenhower was the only president always to wear a glove, and Ronald Reagan, bent on throwing well, smoked a fastball into a crowd at Memorial Stadium. Bill Clinton once played catch with Hillary on the South Lawn to warm up.
"Any president would be foolish not to accept the chance to throw out a first pitch, anywhere, because the act has universal appeal," says Petroskey, who put together a presidential first-pitch exhibit for the White House in 2001. "It doesn't matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat. Fans on both sides will look at you and say, `Hey, I like the game; he likes the game. He must be OK.' "
Sometimes the act is more than just an annual pick-me-up. Wilson's 1916 toss offered a welcome connection to wholesome, all-American values during a brutal war. FDR's famous "Green Light Letter," on display here, had the same effect. Just a month after Pearl Harbor, in January 1942, he wrote the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis: "I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going."
Fifty-nine years later, the current President Bush, a lifelong seamhead who unwinds by reading the sports page or catching highlights on ESPN, delivered what most consider the most dramatic ceremonial first pitch of all time. On Oct. 30, 2001, as the rubble of the Twin Towers smoldered in ruins only miles away, he took the mound at Yankee Stadium before Game 3 of the Arizona-New York World Series.
Bush "is a competitive man," says former presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer, "who wanted badly to bring heat across the heart of the plate to send a symbolic message of hope to the nation." As if Secret Service snipers on the rooftops didn't make for enough pressure, Bush had to overcome the memory of an Opening Day pitch he'd bounced in the dirt at Milwaukee's Miller Park six months before. He wasn't going to let that happen again, Fleischer says.
On the way to the mound, he got a bit of New York razzing. Officials had rigged a pitching rubber in the front half of the mound to shorten the distance, but Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter told him that wouldn't cut it. "This is New York, Mr. President," Jeter said. "You'll have to throw the full distance or they'll boo you."
That got the juices flowing. Wearing a heavy bulletproof Yankee jacket, Bush headed to the mound, ball in hand, the crowd's roar building steadily. "Don't choke, Mr. President," Jeter said.
He didn't.
"Just flat heat, right down the middle," says Fleischer with a hint of awe. "When that place started chanting, U.S.A.! U.S.A.! - well, I can't remember when I've been so moved. It meant so much to the country. He hadn't been cowed."
Latest addition
That ball, signed by Bush, is the most recent in the line of presidential balls on display in Baseball as America. When Fleischer becomes one of millions to see the exhibit in the coming months, it will remind him of what happened the next morning. That was when the president stuck his head into the White House situation room, still jazzed by the thunderous patriotic chants. "Whatever else happens in my presidency," he told his staff, "that is a moment I'll always remember."
So will legions of Americans. As baseball fans have found across the generations, the rituals of their familiar game have a strange power to restore, inspire and summon from the toughest moments something altogether new.
Hitting the stats
Here's a bit of trivia from the Smithsonian's Baseball as America exhibit:
1839: Abner Doubleday does not invent baseball in Cooperstown, N.Y. The game is an American version of a British game called rounders.
1858: First admission fee for a game is charged: 50 cents.
1887: Fred Thayer, captain of Harvard University's baseball team, invents the catcher's mask.
1893: "I dos" are exchanged on a baseball diamond for the first time during a wedding at Cincinnati's League Park.
1908: Although neither of them had ever been to a ballgame, Jack Norworth (lyrics) and Albert Von Tilzer (music) write "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."
1909: A tobacco company issues the Honus Wagner T206 baseball card, which becomes the most valuable baseball card of all time (last sold in 1996 for $640,000).
1911: Helene Britton inherits the St. Louis Cardinals from her uncle, becoming the first woman to own a major league team.
1916: As a promotional ploy, the Chicago Cubs become the first team to let fans keep balls that are hit into the stands.
1941: The Cubs install the first organ in a baseball stadium.
1972: After a lengthy court battle, Bernice Gera becomes - at a minor league game - the first woman umpire in professional baseball.
-K Kaufmann
Exhibit
What: Baseball as America exhibit from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
Where: First floor, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 10th Street and Constitution Ave. N.W., Washington
When: Today-Sept. 30
Hours: Daily 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m.; extended summer hours (10 a.m.-7:30 p.m.) from May 23-Sept. 1
Admission: Free
Call: 202-357-2700 or go to www.baseballasamerica.org
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