Willie, Obama and the Duke...
Posted: Monday, July 13, 2009 6:15 PM by Chuck Todd
From NBC's Chuck Todd
When Pres. Obama travels from Michigan to St. Louis tomorrow, he'll have a hall-of-fame baseball player traveling with him -- Willie Mays. The president is making two stops tomorrow. The first one is in Warren, Michigan, (a suburb of Detroit) where he'll talk about the economy, in general, and job training and worker education specifically. The second stop is St. Louis, Missouri, site of the 2009 Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Mays is flying to Detroit to meet up with the president and join him on Air Force 1 for the flight to St. Louis. The president is throwing out the ceremonial first pitch; it's only the third "first pitch" Obama has ever thrown out, believe it or not and his first one as president.
He did not throw out a SINGLE opening day pitch this year, first sitting president since Ronald Reagan not to throw out a first pitch at an opening day anywhere. The All-Star game is not a bad place to debut your first pitch tossin' as president. BTW, I believe (and I need to triple check this, but it's baseball, so I'll toss this out there now), the last president to throw out a first pitch at an All-Star game was actually a VICE PRESIDENT, at the time. In 1986, then-VP George H.W. Bush threw out the first pitch at the 1986 All-Star game in Houston. And if memory serves, he bounced it to home plate because he had never tossed a baseball while wearing a bullet-proof vest.
*** UPDATE *** After triple-checking, Bush 41's opening pitch was at the Astros-Mets playoff game in '86, not the All Star Game.
