With the Nationals scheduled to open their season on Monday at Nationals Park, the team has yet to announce who will throw the ceremonial first pitch. As part of the more than 100-year-old tradition of presidents (occasionally) throwing the ceremonial first pitch on Opening Day in D.C., Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama took the mound at Nationals Park in 2008 and 2010, respectively. A report on Tuesday suggested that President Trump could resume the tradition this year.
Via Politico:
“Playbook’s Palm Beach correspondent Luke Russert sends in this dispatch: PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP is in talks to throw out the first pitch at Nats Park on Opening Day. He also might spend an inning in the announcing booth with MASN. The Nats open the season next week against the Miami Marlins. Multiple White House aides did not reply to a request for comment.”
The Nationals had no comment on Monday when asked about the possibility of Trump being invited to throw the ceremonial first pitch.
Trump, whose approval rating has dipped to 36 percent, according to a Gallup daily tracking poll, figures to be on the receiving end of some boos and jeers if he appears at Nationals Park on Monday. Then again, it will be impossible to decipher which of the potential boos are in response to the job Trump is doing as president and which are in response to his five-year-old thoughts on the Nationals’ decision to shut down Stephen Strasburg in 2012. Strasburg is slated to throw the non-ceremonial first pitch on Monday.
Oct. 13, 2012 tweet: “When Strasburg leaves in a couple of years under free agency Washington will say ‘what were we doing.’ ”
Oct. 13, 2012: “Washington should have brought in Strasburg to relieve– they would have won.”
Last month, Orioles executive vice president and chief operating officer John Angelos was asked about the idea of inviting Trump to throw a ceremonial first pitch at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.
“Ultimately that decision is with the ownership group as to what major politicians and political figures and societal figures they want to invite,” Angelos said on the B-More Opinionated podcast. “I know that the administration has taken a lot of criticism for its controversial positions; I think more so perhaps for statements made both during the campaign and since the administration came in concerning things that are considered to be problematic from a race, ethnicity, religious, gender, disability. People in those communities have been spoken about very negatively by a candidate and now president.
“You’re asking my personal opinion; I think it’s really incumbent upon any individual who leads the country to step away from those types of statements, to apologize for those statements and retract them. And then to turn the page, and then to move forward in embracing their community, all parts of that community. Until that happens, it wouldn’t be my preference to have the president come throw a pitch. But that’s up to the ownership as to what they would like to do there.”
(c) 2017, The Washington Post
