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Guest column: ‘Herbie’ on parade showcases Hoover’s deep love of baseball
by Tom Walsh · Op-Ed · August 04, 2016
Herbert Hoover’s life-long fascination with baseball will be spotlighted at the annual Hoover Days parade through downtown West Branch on Saturday, August 6.
The parade kicks off at 10 a.m. and will feature a special appearance by “Herbie” – the whimsical, larger-than-life Hoover puppet that competes against other presidential puppets – Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln and others -- in foot races around the warning track at home games played in Washington, D.C. by the Washington Nationals, a powerhouse this year in Major League Baseball’s National League.
“Herbie” was added to the stable of presidential competitors this season by the White House Historical Association, which sponsors the races. Hoover has done well in the races, much better than his White House predecessor Calvin Coolidge did last season.
Born in West Branch in 1874 and orphaned at age 9, young “Bertie” Hoover was raised by Quaker relatives in Iowa and later in Oregon, where coming of age involved total immersion in sandlot baseball. Many years later, in marveling at the skill of major league pitchers and catchers, Hoover seemed to be longing for those anything-goes pickup games of his youth.
“I want more runs in baseball games,” he said in a speech at the 1940 Baseball Writers’ Annual Banquet. “When you were raised on a sandlot where the scores ran 23 to 61, you yearn for something more than a 5 to 2 score. You know as well as I do that the excitement, temperature and decibels of any big game today rise instantly when there is somebody on base. It reaches ecstasy when somebody makes a run. I protest that we fans are being emotionally starved and frustrated by the perfection of these batteries.”
In 1964, four months before his death at age 90, the ailing former President sent this note after receiving a season pass for all major league games: “That pass tells me it’s spring again! And I shall tell my doctors a ball game has more curative powers than their medicines.” In acknowledging a season pass he received the year before, Hoover told New York Mets’ executive M.D. Grant: “I pride myself on being one of the oldest (baseball fans). I can certainly count up about seventy years of devotion.”
Hoover’s fascination with baseball never spilled over into a notable playing career. After he arrived in August of 1891 as a “pioneer” member of Stanford University’s first student body, an adolescent “Bert” Hoover made an effort to win a spot on the Stanford baseball squad. “I had played sandlot baseball before I went to college,” he recalled many years later. “After I played a game or two on the freshman team, the captain said I would make a better manager than a shortstop. So I managed the team. They won most of their games.”
“The greatest moral training, except for religious faith, comes from sportsmanship,” Hoover once wrote. “And baseball has had a greater impact on our American life than any other American sports institution.”
Hoover’s interest in all things baseball were well known. On file within the archives of the Hoover Presidential Library-Museum is this Western Union telegram he received from Cubs fan Bud Garrett on October 24, 1929: “President Hoover: If you do any rooting on ball games today, please root for the Cubs as I have my last five spot on them.” Within a week of that telegram, on October 29, 1929 Hoover’s legacy and the lives of most Americans would be shaken by “Black Monday,” the day that the U.S. stock market crashed, triggering what soon evolved into the Great Depression.
The World Series game that the President attended in Philadelphia on October 14, 1929 -- two weeks before the crash -- caught the attention of humorist, cowboy-philosopher and newspaper columnist Will Rogers. “That was a mighty fine thing of President and Mrs. Hoover, going clear to Philadelphia to see that baseball game,” Rogers wrote. “Baseball is still and always will be our national game. It requires more brains, more practice and more real skill than all our others put together.”
That World Series game would be Hoover’s last until opening day on April 14, 1930, at Griffith Stadium, where as President he threw out the first pitch before Boston defeated Washington, 4-3. Because hard times and high unemployment were sweeping the nation, Hoover was loudly booed whenever he dared to attend a major league baseball game.
Hoover recalled in a 1940 speech a similar experience in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. He interpreted the crowd’s vocal hostility not as a reflection on his presidency, but the fact that, due to Prohibition, there no beer was being sold at the game.”
Perhaps the most-quoted – or, as some historians insist, misquoted – vignette concerning President Hoover and baseball involved Babe Ruth, while the slugger was embroiled in contentious 1930 contract talks with the New York Yankees during the throes of the Depression. His $80,000 contract was running out, and Ruth insisted that he continued to be paid the same amount, despite the Depression. When a sportswriter pointed out that, at $80,000, he would be making more money than the President of the United States, whose annual salary was $75,000, Ruth’s retort was this: “What the hell has Hoover got to do with this?” the Babe reportedly said. “Anyway, I had a better year than he did.”
Hoover’s affinity for baseball and his grasp of the gospel that the values the game reflect were immortalized in 1956 at Crosley Field after the Cincinnati Reds received the former president’s permission to inscribe this quote on the right field wall, where it remained until 1970, when the Reds moved to Riverfront Stadium: “The rigid volunteer rules of right and wrong in sports are second only to religious faith in moral training – and Baseball is the greatest of American sports.”
In his declining years, America’s 31st president remained more than less confined by his failing health to his suite in midtown Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Towers. In a note written in April of 1962 to Warren Giles, president of the National League, and to Joseph Cronin, president American League, Hoover wrote this at age 88: “I am still a baseball fan. Although most of my games now may have to be seen in front of the television.”
A year later, in response to receiving another rite of spring season pass, Hoover wrote this note to Cronin: “How kind of you to send me that pass! Right now, doctors are sort of restricting my activities, but I hope to elude them later in the baseball season.”
Hoover died on October 20, 1964, at age 90, within a week of the St. Louis Cardinals winning a seven-game World Series over the New York Yankees. It would be the last World Series for Yankee legends Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle. It was also the last Fall Classic for one of baseball’s biggest fans, Herbert Hoover.
A former executive director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association, Tom Walsh now lives and works in Downeast Maine
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