Today’s Washington Nationals may never win a World Series title, but they seem to have a knack for presidential history, at least as it pertains to their mascot race. During each home baseball game, the Nationals have a presidential mascot race after the top of the fourth inning. The Mt. Rushmore quartet—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt—loop around the field to the delight of Nationals fans. It’s good, simple fun. “The only two rules we had,” said Josh Golden, the Nationals’ director of marketing, “were don’t fall down and Teddy doesn’t win.” And for the first 525 races (yes, 5-2-5), Theodore Roosevelt did not win. Ever. Payback, as they say, is a, well . . . it’s not fun.
Roosevelt really began solidifying his place in this baseball purgatory in 1906. During his fifth full year in the White House, his cold war on baseball could no longer be overlooked. The press picked up on the fact that Roosevelt ignored the World Series (PRESIDENT DECLINES. Will Not Be Able to Take in the World’s Series) and never attended Major League games in the District. “The fact is,” the Baltimore Sun wrote in 1906, “that Mr. Roosevelt is not greatly interested in the national game nor has he ever been.” Baseball’s leadership could have just let it go. Roosevelt’s time in the White House was dwindling; there would be a new president to win over in a couple of years. But no. Rather than minimizing Roosevelt’s slight, baseball’s leadership launched an all-out assault to win over Roosevelt. Oh yes, he will like us became the (unstated) rallying cry.
It seems clear now that baseball had hit its adolescence. The game was at once confident in its newfound strength and desperately insecure about where to sit in the cafeteria that was America’s Strenuous Life paradigm. “We first learned to admire Mr. Roosevelt while we were on the editorial staff of the Outing Magazine in the early ’80s,” wrote Henry Chadwick, the self-proclaimed “Father of Baseball,” in 1903. “‘We the people’ should feel happy, indeed, by reason of the fact that our President combines with his ‘strenuosity for the right’ and enlightened conscience and a large measure of brains.” Such statements by baseball leaders became commonplace. Chadwick, along with the editors of the Sporting Life (known as “The Paper that made Base Ball Popular”), sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding, and American League President Ban Johnson all did their parts to get Roosevelt on board with the National Pastime. Still, the president did not attend a game during his first term, despite the fact that the Senators’ ballpark sat just two miles from the White House.