It's Tuesday Feb. 6. I know it's Super Bowl week, and what I'm about to say is heresy to some people (maybe even me, since I grew up as a San Francisco 49ers fan), but it's only three days until the first pitchers and catchers report for spring training. I'm thinking of baseball this morning because two great stars of the diamond were born on this date.
The first was Babe Ruth, who arrived in Baltimore on Feb. 6, 1895. He did not have an easy childhood.
George Herman Ruth spent the first seven years of life living with his family in rooms above his father's saloon at 426 W. Camden St. in Baltimore. In 1902, the boy was placed in St. Mary's Industrial School in Baltimore, which is often described as an orphanage, but which Ruth himself defined as "a training school for orphans, incorrigibles, delinquents, boys whose homes had been broken by divorce, runaways picked up on the streets of Baltimore and children of poor parents who had no other means of providing an education for them."
So why was young George Ruth sent to St. Mary's reform school?
"I was listed as an incorrigible, and I guess I was," his autobiography concedes. "I chewed tobacco when I was 7, not that I enjoyed it especially, but, from my observation around the saloon it seemed the normal thing to do."
He was in and out of that institution until Feb. 27, 1914. The priests and other instructors were teaching him how to be a tailor, but outside the classroom he was in training for another pastime, one denoted in a simple line on his school record: "He is going to join the Balt. baseball team."
The young man's subsequent exploits on the baseball diamonds of Baltimore, New York, and elsewhere are woven into the fabric of 20th century American history. So, too, are the exploits of Ronald Wilson Reagan, born in Tampico, Ill., on Feb. 6, 1911. This boy had problematic father, too. His father Jack had "the Irish disease," as his younger son would later put it. Although we wouldn't phrase it that way today out of heightened sensibilities about ethnic stereotypes, "disease" is the right word. Jack Reagan was an alcoholic. But back to my other reference to the 40th U.S. president. You didn't know Ronald Reagan was a baseball star?
Well, that was a bit of misdirection. Reagan only played one in the movies.
Ronald Reagan rose to fame in the Midwest as "Dutch" Reagan, the voice of the Chicago Cubs beloved by Iowans who tuned into WHO radio in Des Moines, where Reagan re-created Cubs games off the teletype. It was during a spring training trip to Catalina Island, where the Cubbies assembled each February, that Reagan got the idea to go to Hollywood for his fateful 1937 screen test.
Fifteen years later, he was cast alongside Doris Day in "The Winning Team," a schmaltzy movie about Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander and his wife. As baseball writer Joe Posnanski noted, Hollywood whiffed. ("It shouldn't be this bad," he wrote. "The movie stars Ronald Reagan as pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander. This is such a wonderful confluence of American history; it makes Alexander the only player in sports history to be named for one president and to have another president play him in a movie.")
It does have a couple of good moments. Although it took liberties with the sequence, the movie depicts the Cardinals' 39-year-old Alexander striking out Babe Ruth. Reagan is playing "Alex" and the Ruth strikeout is drawn from archival footage, so in a sense Ronald Reagan is striking out Babe Ruth, something he never would have been able to do in real life. But there is this: Reagan's body double during that film was Bob Lemon, another Hall of Fame pitcher. Here's a story he told a Sports Illustrated reporter about the 1952 filming of "The Winning Team."
"The idea was that Alexander was making this comeback. So he nailed a catcher's mitt on the side of his barn. The director calls me over and says, ‘Now, I want you to hit that mitt right in the middle.' ‘Piece of cake,' says I. Under ordinary circumstances I hit that mitt nine times out of 10. Well, maybe it was the cameras or something, but I got nowhere near it. I was hitting everything on that barn but the damn mitt, and the madder I got, the worse I got.
"Then I hear this voice say, ‘Mind if I try it?' It's Reagan. Now, I won't say he threw exactly like a girl, but I doubted he could hit the broad side of that barn. But I said, ‘O.K., you try.' I guess I don't have to say more: One pitch, smack in the middle of that mitt. I've never been so embarrassed in all my life."
Bob Lemon never had anything to be embarrassed about when it came to baseball. The year that movie was made, he won 22 games for the Cleveland Indians while leading the league in complete games and innings pitched. And he would hardly be the last person to underestimate Ronald Reagan.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
