President Hoover, Iowa’s native son, loved the game

Often portrayed by historians as an emotionless, one-dimensional stuffed shirt, President Herbert Hoover had a torrid love affair before, during and after his four years in the White House.

It was a love affair with baseball.

'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.”

Orphaned at age nine, 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's 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 ballgame 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 70 years of devotion.”

Hoover's fascination with baseball never spilled over into a notable playing career. After he arrived in August 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.”

Hoover had never run for public office before his landslide Republican victory over Democrat Al Smith in the 1928 presidential election.

But long before he was fielding invitations as president to throw out first pitches, Hoover remained an active booster of both amateur and professional baseball during his appointed stint between 1920 and 1928 as U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

In 1921, he closely followed the federal employees' baseball championship held at American League Park in Washington, D.C., including a Treasury versus Census game featuring teams organized within the Colored Departmental Baseball League. Admission was 55 cents.

Later, as president, Hoover agreed to autograph a dozen baseballs for use as trophies for winning teams participating in the 1929 District of Columbia sandlot series, which was played on government diamonds. In effect, the President had upper-deck seats, as those government diamonds were visible from the second-story balcony off the President's residential quarters at the White House.

Hoover personally attended the August, 20, 1929, American Legion Junior World Series, a game at Washington's Griffith Stadium between teams from Buffalo, N.Y., and Uniontown, Pa.

Hoover's interest in all things baseball were well known. On file within the archives of his presidential library in West Branch is this Western Union telegram he received from Cubs fan Bud Garrett on Oct. 24, 1929: 'President Hoover: If you do any rooting on ballgames today, please root for the Cubs as I have my last five spot on them.”

Within a week of that telegram, on Oct. 29, 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 Oct. 14 - 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, whereas President he threw out the first pitch before Boston defeated Washington, 4-3. Throughout his first and only term, Hoover was villainized, his critics convinced that he was in some way responsible for the hard times and unprecedented unemployment that was sweeping the nation.

Despite the fact that in October 1930, the New York Times dubbed Hoover 'The first baseball fan of the land,” Hoover was widely criticized and loudly booed whenever he dared to attend a major league baseball game.

After Hoover traveled to Philadelphia for a 1931 World Series game, a Capt. William MacDonald wrote the Philadelphia papers a caustic letter to the editor, criticizing Hoover 'because he did so in the midst of a veritable financial panic, when banks with deposits of approximately $25 million closed their doors.”

Thirty years later, legendary newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler would pen this account of a geriatric Hoover attending a World Series game in 1960, a column that recalled Hoover's ballpark experience in Philadelphia in 1931.

'I, too, respect Mr. Hoover now,” Pegler wrote on Oct. 28, 1960 - a generation after the crash. ”But there was a day in the 'thirties when a mob at one of Connie Mack's World Series in Philadelphia kicked up a tumult of hatred which gave me insensate delight. It was that hatred which defeated Hoover in '32 and doomed our country to Roosevelt's war, then Truman's war and now their mutual cold war for the merest survival of the U.SA. …

On that occasion long ago Mr. Hoover had come up from Washington to see a ballgame, but was not observed until about the seventh, when his party quietly moved toward the tunnel to beat the rush to the street. Then, suddenly, the brute raised its native cry: ‘Boo-oo-oo!'”

Two weeks earlier a similar account appeared as an item in The Telegram, a Worcester, Mass., newspaper: 'Suddenly there was a big cheer from the crowd. What for? Neither the Yankees nor the Pirates were doing anything special at the moment. The applause was for the arrival of a prominent baseball fan - former President Herbert Hoover.

'Hoover arrived at another World Series a generation ago. He was President Hoover then. If there were any cheers, they were not heard above the loud and bitter booing. The great depression was on.”

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.

'I notice recent references to reports of the World Series game in 1932 in Philadelphia, which I attended while I was at the White House,” he said. 'There were a number of thirsty people present who had no patience with Constitutional practices in government. They expressed their desire to abolish law enforcement with more than the usual delicacy when I entered the grandstand.”

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 sports writer 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.”

Thirty years later, legendary Yankees' catcher Yogi Berra made a similar comment while being interviewed by broadcaster Joe Garagiola before a World Series game: 'You amaze me, Yog,” Garagiola said. 'You've now become such a world figure that you drew more applause yesterday than either (Indian) Prime Minister Nehru or Herbert Hoover. Can you explain it?”

'Certainly,” Berra replied. 'I'm a better hitter.”

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 1962 to Warren Giles, president of the National League, and to Joseph Cronin, president of the 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 Oct. 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 was also a sports writer for the Dallas Morning News.