Which President Loved Baseball? The Full Story
Baseball and the American presidency have been tangled together for over 150 years. Some presidents just threw out first pitches. Others genuinely, deeply loved the game.
The short answer (and why it's more complicated than you think)
If you ask most historians which president loved baseball the most, one name comes up immediately: William Howard Taft. He's credited with starting the tradition of the presidential first pitch in 1910, when he stood up at a Washington Senators game on Opening Day and threw the ball to pitcher Walter Johnson. But Taft's relationship with the game ran deeper than one ceremonial toss. He attended games regularly, followed standings, and genuinely saw baseball as a reflection of American civic life.
Still, "most" is a loaded word. Dwight D. Eisenhower played semi-professionally before his military career. Ronald Reagan literally broadcast baseball games on the radio. And Franklin D. Roosevelt made one of the most consequential decisions in the sport's history during World War II. So no, there isn't one single answer. But there are clear tiers.
William Howard Taft: the first true baseball president
Taft didn't just like baseball. He used it. As the 27th president, he understood the political and cultural weight the sport carried in early 20th-century America. Opening Day 1910 at American League Park in Washington set a precedent that every president followed for over a century. According to Baseball Reference, Walter Johnson went on to win that game 3-0, which made Taft's ceremonial involvement feel almost charmed in retrospect.
Beyond the first pitch, Taft attended multiple games per season, something that was genuinely unusual for a sitting president. He reportedly struggled to fit in standard stadium seats (he weighed over 300 pounds), which some historians half-jokingly credit with the gradual widening of ballpark seats over the following decades. Apocryphal or not, the story says something about how closely associated he was with the ballpark experience.
What president liked baseball the most? The case for multiple answers
The honest answer depends on what you mean by "liked." Let's break it down by category.
As a player: Eisenhower
Dwight Eisenhower was an actual ballplayer before he became famous for anything else. He played center field at Abilene High School in Kansas and reportedly had the tools to play at a higher level. There's a persistent story, difficult to fully verify, that he briefly played semi-pro ball under an assumed name while at West Point to protect his eligibility. Whether entirely true or embellished over time, it speaks to how seriously he took the game as an athlete. The Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene holds records and photos documenting his athletic years, and baseball features prominently among them.
As a fan: Taft and FDR
Franklin D. Roosevelt's contribution to baseball is often underrated. In January 1942, just weeks after Pearl Harbor, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote to Roosevelt asking whether the season should continue. Roosevelt wrote back what became known as the "Green Light Letter," saying baseball should keep going because it was good for national morale. That letter, now considered one of the most important documents in baseball history, shows someone who understood the game's place in American culture at a very specific moment of national crisis.
As a broadcaster: Reagan
Ronald Reagan's baseball credentials are genuinely underappreciated. Before his Hollywood career and long before his political one, he worked as a radio announcer for the Chicago Cubs and other Midwest games in the 1930s. He would recreate games from ticker-tape reports, describing play-by-play action for games he wasn't actually watching. It was a common practice at the time, but Reagan was reportedly good at it, inventing plausible filler detail when the ticker went silent. He later played Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander in the 1952 film "The Winning Team." Baseball ran through a lot of his early life.
Which US president was the best athlete?
This question comes up alongside the baseball one, and it deserves a real answer. Gerald Ford is probably the most credible answer if you're measuring raw athletic ability. He was a center and linebacker at the University of Michigan, good enough that both the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers offered him contracts after college. He turned them down to attend Yale Law School.
But for baseball specifically, Eisenhower holds up. George H.W. Bush also deserves mention. He captained the Yale baseball team and played first base well enough to be part of the first two College World Series, in 1947 and 1948. When Babe Ruth visited Yale in 1948 (shortly before Ruth's death), Bush was the captain who received the original manuscript of Ruth's autobiography. There's a famous photo. Bush's baseball connection was real and documented.
George W. Bush owned the Texas Rangers from 1989 to 1994, which puts him in a different category entirely. He wasn't just a fan or a former player. He sat in the owner's box, attended games obsessively, and has said in multiple interviews that those years running the Rangers were among the happiest of his life. Whether that makes him a "better" baseball president than Taft or Eisenhower depends on your definition, but his immersion in the sport was total.
What is Donald Trump's favorite baseball team?
Trump has expressed affinity for the New York Yankees over the years, which makes geographic sense given his New York background. He's thrown out first pitches at Yankee Stadium events and has referenced the team in public statements. That said, Trump isn't strongly identified with baseball the way some other presidents are. His sporting preferences lean more toward golf and boxing. The Yankees connection appears to be more casual regional loyalty than deep fandom.
Which baseball team did JFK support?
John F. Kennedy grew up in Massachusetts, so the Boston Red Sox were the natural allegiance, and he claimed them publicly on more than one occasion. He attended several Red Sox games and made the kind of casual references to the team that suggest genuine familiarity rather than performed fandom. Kennedy threw out first pitches as president, including at the 1962 All-Star Game at D.C. Stadium, a game that featured 9 future Hall of Famers. He reportedly had a decent arm.
Kennedy's connection to baseball also had a Latin American dimension that's easy to overlook. His presidency coincided with an era of rapid expansion in Caribbean and Latin American scouting, a period that MLB.com en español has covered extensively in its historical features on how the sport grew across the region. The early 1960s were when Dominican, Venezuelan, and Cuban players began appearing in major league rosters in larger numbers, reshaping the sport permanently.
For a deeper look at how that story unfolded, the history of cómo Latinoamérica se enamoró del béisbol covers the political and cultural forces that pulled the sport southward, many of which were active during Kennedy's time in office.
The tradition of the presidential first pitch
It started with Taft in 1910 and continued almost without interruption through the modern era. Woodrow Wilson threw out the most first pitches of any president (50 over his two terms, according to various records). Jimmy Carter was reportedly the most accurate. George W. Bush, by multiple accounts, threw the best single first pitch in presidential history: a perfect strike from the mound at Yankee Stadium before Game 3 of the 2001 World Series, six weeks after September 11, under enormous pressure, wearing a bulletproof vest under his jacket. Stadium officials had told him not to throw from the mound because a wild pitch would look bad. He did it anyway.
Obama broke the tradition in several years by choosing to throw from the front of the mound rather than from the rubber, drawing criticism from baseball fans. Trump skipped the tradition entirely during his first term. Biden resumed it. The first pitch has become a kind of barometer for presidential comfort with public performance, and baseball fans notice.
Why baseball became the presidential sport
No other American sport has the same depth of presidential association. Football didn't become a national obsession until the 1960s. Basketball is even more recent. Baseball, for most of American presidential history, was simply the sport. It was what Americans did in summer, what cities argued about, what newspapers covered on the front page.
The White House Historical Association has documented the presidential connection to baseball going back to Abraham Lincoln, who was known to enjoy "base ball" (the two-word spelling of the era) and reportedly watched games near the White House grounds. That's not verified the way Taft's first pitch is, but the historical thread is long.
There's also a practical political dimension. Being seen at a ballgame, loving the national pastime, signals something about a politician's relationship to ordinary American life. It's not cynical to notice this. It may be calculated, but for many of the presidents mentioned here, the love was real first and the politics came second.
Understanding the rhythms of the game itself helps explain why presidents got hooked. The slow build of a pennant race, the statistical texture of a season, the way a single game can turn on one pitch. Anyone curious about that texture might start with how to leer un box score de béisbol, because the numbers tell a story that goes well beyond the final score.
The honest answer, finally
Taft started it. FDR understood it at a civic level. Eisenhower lived it as an athlete. Reagan broadcast it before most Americans had a television. George H.W. Bush played it in college and nearly cried when he met Babe Ruth. George W. Bush owned a team and probably misses it every day.
If forced to pick one, most baseball historians would still say Taft, because he formalized the relationship between the presidency and the sport in a way that shaped everything that followed. But the real answer is that baseball has been part of the American presidency for so long that asking which president loved it is a bit like asking which fish loves water. The more interesting question is what each president's version of that love tells us about who they were before the office got to them.