Unathletic non-fan Calvin Coolidge is now a big-headed baseball mascot
New England’s own ‘Silent Cal’ will be part of the Washington Nationals’ game-day race.
Calvin Coolidge is set to be honored by the Washington Nationals as one of their big-headed racing presidents, even though his own wife noted his lack of athleticism and interest in baseball.
A mascot featuring the outsized noggin of President Coolidge will run the warning track during Friday’s Nationals-Giants game, The Washington Post reports, alongside the regular lineup of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and William Taft.
Including Coolidge, the Vermont native and former Massachusetts governor, is a curious choice given his relative anonymity among presidents and his milquetoast baseball acumen.
“Mr. Coolidge never played baseball,’’ his wife Grace, herself a big baseball fanatic, once wrote. “I know of no sport in which he took part. He did not share my enthusiasm for baseball.’’
In 1946, First Lady Grace Coolidge chatted up Red Sox manager Joe Cronin before taking in a game.
True, Coolidge threw out the first pitch at a number of Washington Senators games, including on Opening Day against the Red Sox in 1927 and ’28.
“President Coolidge, who was accompanied by Mrs. Coolidge, and stayed throughout the game, showed little evidence of lameness in his wrist when he tossed out the first ball as a battery of camera men recorded the action,’’ The Boston Globe wrote after a 6-2 Senators win over the Sox.
If historical accuracy is valued, don’t expect Coolidge to win the presidential race on Friday. According to sports historian John Sayle Watterson’s book, The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency, Coolidge wasn’t much of an athlete.
“Among twentieth-century presidents, none was less athletic than Calvin Coolidge,’’ Watterson writes. A college friend of Coolidge’s once recalled, “Cal always hated exercise, and never took an inch of it if he could help it.’’
The former President wasn’t much for a baseball analyst either. He once made the bone-headed comment that “Babe Ruth made a big mistake when he gave up pitching.’’
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