San Antonio Light and Gazette · San Antonio, Texas · 1909

Speaking of Fans, He's Got the Bug Right, This One

May 1909: President Taft declares baseball the one clean sport, a cartoon renders him as a peanut-eating hot air balloon over the grandstand, and the president goes on record against the bunt. I believe they should hit it out.

The news from Pittsburg was that the President of the United States was one of us: “All doubts concerning President Taft’s opinion of baseball were dispelled yesterday when President Taft stated that in his opinion baseball was the cleanest, the finest and the manliest sport in all Christendom.” And no, Pittsburg is not missing anything. In 1890 a federal spelling board relieved the city of its H, and it spent two decades filing protests until Washington surrendered the letter back in 1911. This dispatch lands square in the H-less years, when a town that would not quit fighting for one consonant had every right to lecture the rest of us on loving something properly. The San Antonio Light and Gazette celebrated with a cartoon signed P. Fox: Taft as a beaming sphere the size of the outfield, floating above the grandstand with a bag labeled PEA-NUTS, under the headline “Speaking of Fans, He’s Got the Bug Right, This One.”

Taft’s own testimony holds up: “Baseball appeals to me as the one clean sport. There is no jockeying, no flimflamming, no chicanery as in some other sports, horse racing, for instance. I enjoy baseball.” The dispatch notes he spent his Sunday talking baseball at a private residence, the way a man with the bug does.

Best of all, the president had takes. He “reiterated his dislike for the bunting game. Several times Saturday when a hit meant a run and when the batter was ordered to bunt, the president gave utterance to impatient remarks.” Then, for the record: “I believe they should hit it out. I like to see games where there is plenty of ‘slugging,’ I believe the sporting writers call it.” A president against the bunt and pro-peanut. He is not the last president to appear in these pages at a ball game either: Wilson took his fiancee six years later.