Just turn the page and play your best ball tomorrow. Maddux, wearing his Braves No. Fittingly, he threw the pitch to Eddie Perez, who was often his designated catcher. After that, he had a little fun on Twitter.
Maddux won four consecutive Cy Young Awards for the Chicago Cubs and the Braves, including in when he posted a remarkable record with a 1. Entering Game 5, Bregman had only one hit in 14 World Series at-bats. He was hitting seventh. He went 1 for 4 with a double and an RBI in Game 5. His personal receiver in his first term with the Reds was David Ross, who retired last year at What Arroyo meant was that bad first pitches that are high are OK.
Bad first pitches that bounce up there are tragic. It is not. I can and do write bad columns. They do not reflect poorly on my pride. I can pour oil into the radiator and nobody knows but me and my mechanic, who already grasps that my talents lie elsewhere. The pressure on men to be manly damned men is enormous.
Throwing a ceremonial first-pitch strike is right up there with accepting stupid dares and using power tools to build stuff. The Famer brags shamelessly about the strike he threw before Game 3 of the division series against San Francisco. He is a manly man. Eric Davis was the catcher that day. Curtis James Jackson was nearly as bad.
In all, presidents have thrown out the first ball at seven World Series most recently and four All-Star Games most recently For the most part, however, they've kept the first-ball tradition confined to Opening Day. And as you can see, it remained an Opening Day treat for Washington fans for a long time. The format of the presidential first ball was also slow to change. At first, the president always threw from the stands. And though Taft started the tradition by aiming his first ball at Walter Johnson, things evolved to where the first ball was thrown into a rabble of players who would scramble to own such a cherished souvenir.
John Drebinger of The New York Times subscription required used the words "battle" and "skirmish" to describe the chase after Roosevelt's first ball at the '37 All-Star Game. That's no overstatement, as Steve Wulf of Sports Illustrated once wrote that players would elbow and shove each other to get at the ball.
As such, it's no surprise that a custom not exactly built to last didn ' t last. According to Wulf, the "scrambling era" met its demise during Richard Nixon's administration, just in time to save players from additional injury risk at a time when salaries were due to skyrocket with the arrival of free agency in the mids.
Decades later, here we are accustomed to one lucky player doing the catching, just as it was meant to be when Taft and Johnson hooked up in The scrambling aspect of the tradition wasn't the only practice that changed during the Nixon administration. He was also the first president to throw out the first ball on Opening Day somewhere other than Washington D.
Not that Nixon had much of a choice, of course. The first Senators franchise moved to Minnesota and became the Twins in The next Senators franchise moved to Texas and became the Rangers in It wasn't until the Montreal Expos moved to Washington and became the Nationals in that the nation's capital had its own major league club again.
Once Nixon's opening pitch left his hand in Anaheim in '73, just one more longstanding aspect of the presidential first-ball tradition would become a thing of the past. Starting with Taft in , it had been customary for the presidential first ball to come from the front row of the stands.
It afforded presidents a chance to share the occasion with their cronies, which made for some candid moments for photographers. For one photographer, this proved to be an occupational hazard.
Farley, threw a ball that damaged the camera of one of the press photographers at the scene. Umpires weren't safe, either. As the story goes, according to a Times article , in , Dwight Eisenhower yielded to pleas from photographers for a second pitch and uncorked a throw that hit an umpire in the leg. Indeed, accuracy would have been a problem with throws from the stands. It's also probably why they were called "first balls" rather than "first pitches," as a proper "pitch" is thrown from a mound to a catcher.
Though Bill Clinton is often credited with being the first president to throw a first ball from the mound, the picture you see here is of Reagan throwing from the mound at Wrigley Field in Which wasn't even the first time Reagan had done so. He threw from the mound when he was governor of California, too, notably when he welcomed the Athletics to Oakland on April 17, , with what Bill Becker of The Times said was an "apparent slider, high and inside. What Clinton did do, though, was take the budding mound tradition to the next level.
When Clinton threw out the first ball in Baltimore shortly after taking office in —former Orioles announcer Jon Miller introduced Clinton as "a rookie who just moved into the area from Arkansas," according to Michael Kelly of The Times — he became the first president to throw a first pitch from the mound that made it to the catcher on the fly. Though Clinton set a precedent, George W. Bush followed Clinton with some first-pitch firsts of his own.
In throwing out first pitches in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Washington, D. When he opened for the Nationals in , he became the first president to christen a new D. Kennedy in Though more than a little high and a little wide, Obama's pitch marked the year anniversary of Taft's first ball in
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