Having the President throw out the first pitch to open a new baseball season is a tradition dating to 1910. This practice has also come to include World Series games and the All-Star game. Several residents of the White House have been closely associated with the National Pastime: George Bush was an accomplished first baseman at Yale, Jimmy Carter an enthusiastic pitcher for his softball team, and Ronald Reagan played Grover Cleveland Alexander on the screen.

     Perhaps President Eisenhower summed it up best: "When I was a small boy in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there in the warmth of the summer afternoon on a river bank, we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him that I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be president of the United States. Neither of us got our wish."

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