President Donald Trump will have three more chances to do what he didn’t do in his first term: Throw out a ceremonial first pitch to open a Major League Baseball season in Washington.
Trump, who was booed when he attended Game 5 of the 2019 World Series at Nationals Park, ended a tradition that began in 1910 with President William Howard Taft. Taft’s successors – Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon all did it in D.C. before the city lost its team. When baseball returned to Washington, George W. Bush resumed the practice at the first Nationals’ home game in 2005. Barack Obama continued it.
Trump didn’t make it, despite his professed love of the game. Before the first pitch of the 2017 season came and went, Trump already had dumped from his inaugural parade the longtime Senators’ public address announcer Charlie Brotman, who had done the same job at every presidential inaugural since Eisenhower’s.
Trump has always claimed to have been an outstanding baseball player when he attended high school at the New York Military Academy in the early 1960s. At times, he’s gone so far as to say he was good enough to have played professionally.
He did in fact play three seasons at first base for the academy’s baseball team. In his senior year, he was co-captain. Yet available evidence contradicts his various claims of professional ability or having been the best baseball player in the state of New York.
At least two presidents were good enough to have played baseball at a reasonably high level. Dwight Eisenhower was paid to play semi-pro ball before he attended West Point. George H.W. Bush played first base for Yale, a Division I college team. Trump did not play beyond high school.
What has drawn renewed attention to Trump’s relationship with the game is the president’s plan to pardon the late Pete Rose for his tax fraud conviction. Trump paired that with a renewed call for MLB to lift its permanent ban on the all-time hit leader, which the commissioner subsequently did. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump called baseball a “dying” sport. He wrote that MLB “should get off its fat, lazy ass” and put Rose in the Hall of Fame.
MLB actually does not decide membership in the Hall, whose board sets the criteria for admission. The Baseball Writers Association of America and two Eras committees vote to determine who is enshrined.
In 2020, Leander Schaerlaeckens wrote for Slate about his detailed investigation into Trump’s claims of professional-level baseball skills.
In response to a query from Schaerlaeckens, then-deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley replied in an email: “President Trump loves baseball and has a deep appreciation and profound respect for the game. By all accounts, President Trump was an outstanding baseball player who garnered interest from some professional teams.”
Yet the accounts uncovered for the Slate story were vastly at odds with Gidley’s response. Published articles about the New York Military Academy’s baseball team and the recollections of several students who played with Trump make clear that Trump was not even the best player on the team. Moreover, no player on the team was good enough to draw the interest of professional scouts. Trump apparently was well liked and a good fielding first baseman, but not much of a hitter.
Despite this, Trump’s recollection of his high school playing days was quite different. “I was supposed to be a pro baseball player …. I had good talent,” he was quoted as saying in an interview for the 2004 book, The Games Do Count: America’s Best and Brightest on the Power of Sports, compiled by Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade. Trump went on to recall a local newspaper headline that read “TRUMP HOMERS TO WIN THE GAME.”
Schaerlaeckens’ extensive research of the archives of the local newspapers in the Hudson Valley, where the military academy is located, could find no such headline, nor did Trump’s team play the high school against whom he recalled hitting his home run. Yet it was something, Trump said, “I will never forget.”
In the same book, Trump wrote that “being a pro was in the equation.” He said he gave up that notion when he and “another young kid named Willie McCovey” attended the same tryout in 1963. By then, however, McCovey was an established major league all-star, not a kid at a tryout.
Whether Trump ever will throw out a first pitch is open to question. He declined an invitation from the Nationals to do so in 2017, with the White House citing a “scheduling conflict.” He also declined a similar invitation to throw out the first pitch at a World Series game in D.C. in 2019, although he did host members of the Nationals team at the White House a week after they won Game 7. Sean Doolittle and six other players on the 25-man roster did not attend. Only Doolittle openly said it was a political decision.
The mass layoffs of thousands of government workers soon after he returned to office in 2025 certainly hasn’t won Trump any popularity points in the nation’s capital. Voters in D.C. overwhelmingly chose Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024 over Trump, who surely does not relish a repeat of his reception at the World Series game.
To be fair, Biden didn’t throw out a first pitch during his term, so even if Trump showed up, the continuity is gone. In any case, both he and Biden had thrown out first pitches at MLB games before they were in the White House. So there’s always that.
Washington baseball history 