WASHINGTON — He once boasted that he was the best baseball player in the state of New York. But when the World Series comes to the nation’s capital on Friday night for the first time in 86 years, no one is saying if President Trump will be on hand to watch.
He does plan to go to the game on Sunday if there is one, he said Thursday, but he said he has no plans to throw out a ball.
“I don’t know, they got to dress me up in a lot of heavy armor,” he told reporters. “ I’ll look too heavy.”
Unlike any president since 1910, Mr. Trump has never attended a major-league baseball game while living in the White House, dispensing with an apple-pie tradition that has provided unifying moments even in divisive times. While the rest of the town has reveled in the stunning success of Juan Soto, Howie Kendrick and the once-left-for-dead Nats, Mr. Trump has stayed uncharacteristically quiet.
Mr. Trump is surely aware that Nationals Park may not be the most hospitable territory for a president who drew just 4 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia in 2016 and describes its permanent residents as “the Swamp.” No president likes to be booed. This one prefers stadiums filled with his supporters for campaign rallies.
“He would do much better if he threw out a pitch in Houston,” said Tom Davis, a Republican former congressman from Virginia who worked for years to bring baseball back to Washington. Trump won Texas by 9 percentage points in 2016.
With or without Mr. Trump, the game Friday night stands as a landmark moment for a city cursed by the baseball gods for generations. The last time baseball’s championship was played in Washington was in 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt threw out the first pitch. Roosevelt “made an imposing entry” and was given “a boisterous reception,” as The New York Times recorded, although “the president of course maintained an attitude of strict neutrality.”
The Washington Senators, also commonly called the Nationals at the time, went on to beat the New York Giants at Griffith Stadium 4-0 on that rainy day but lost the series. After that, the town fell on hard baseball times, so much so that “Damn Yankees” featured a desperate Senators fan willing to trade his soul to the devil for just one long-ball hitter.
The first-in-war, first-in-peace, last-in-the-American-League Senators eventually decamped to Minnesota to become the Twins and then the expansion club that took its place left for Texas to become the Rangers.
After more than three decades without baseball, the Montreal Expos moved to Washington in 2005 and became the Nationals, becoming perhaps the only bipartisan agreement in a capital rived by tribalism as Republicans and Democrats flocked to games. The team’s miserable start last spring followed by a remarkable surge over the summer and now a two-game lead in the World Series have been the stuff of Hollywood scripts.
But while senators and congressmen and cabinet officers exult over the team, Mr. Trump has exhibited no public interest, perhaps a little surprising for a man who still relishes his time playing first base on the baseball team at New York Military Academy, where, he was not only the team captain but said on Twitter in 2013 that he was “said to be the best” player in the state, adding “ask coach Ted Dobias-said best he ever coached.”
(Mr. Dobias put it a little differently in 2015, describing Mr. Trump as “very coachable,” which “made him a good baseball player.”)
Mr. Trump has rarely shied away from offering his opinions about baseball before. He has tweeted admiration for Yogi Berra, Derek Jeter and Carlos Beltran while repeatedly urging Major League Baseball to induct Pete Rose into its Hall of Fame despite his gambling scandal. He has also trashed Alex Rodriguez relentlessly (“A-Rod is a joke!” and “the biggest sports embarrassment of all time.”).
He has presented himself as a good-luck talisman. “I’m going to the @Yankees game tonight to root them on — they always win when I am there,” he wrote in 2012. And he even criticized the Nationals for sitting star pitcher Stephen Strasburg during the playoffs in 2012 when he was still recovering from Tommy John surgery.
“When Strasburg leaves @Nationals for another team for more money, will Washington still like the decision to shut him down for his good?” Mr. Trump wrote at the time.
There is a long tradition of presidents embracing baseball, going all the way back to Benjamin Harrison, who became the first commander in chief to attend a professional game in 1892. William Howard Taft loved the sport so much he inaugurated the tradition of throwing the opening-day pitch in 1910.
Other presidents had genuine affinity for the sport. Dwight D. Eisenhower played semiprofessional baseball under an assumed name before heading to West Point. Ronald Reagan broadcast play-by-play radio accounts of Chicago Cubs games recreated from a telegraph wire. George Bush was captain of the Yale baseball team, played in two national college championships and kept his mitt in his drawer in the Oval Office. His son George W. Bush was an owner and managing partner of the Texas Rangers.
While most of Mr. Trump’s predecessors relished going to the ballpark, he would not be the first to be booed or to worry about being booed. The younger Mr. Bush decided to throw out the first pitch in Game 3 of the World Series in New York in October 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks as a potent symbol of national resolve but fretted that he would throw it in the dirt as he had done earlier in the year in Milwaukee.
The pressure in Yankee Stadium mounted when Derek Jeter teasingly warned him beforehand: “Don’t bounce it! They’ll boo you!” To his enormous relief, Mr. Bush, with a Kevlar vest under his jacket, sent the ball 60½ feet cleanly over the plate and right into the catcher’s glove, as the crowd chanted, “U-S-A, U-S-A!” It was “the most nervous moment of my presidency,” Mr. Bush said later.
And no wonder. “It’s always potentially hazardous for politicians to appear at a sporting events and expose themselves to the verbal ravages of the crowd,” said David Axelrod, who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama, whose own opening-day pitch in Nationals Stadium in 2010 went a little further astray. “It may be particularly so for Donald Trump in D.C.”
Curt Smith, a former speechwriter for the elder Mr. Bush and author of “The Presidents and the Pastime: The History of Baseball and the White House,” published last year, said Mr. Trump should have continued the tradition before now, noting that, before becoming president, he threw out first pitches at Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park and Wrigley Field.
“He would be booed,” Mr. Smith agreed. “However, every president is booed at baseball games. It’s part of the job. He should put on a Nationals jacket, wear an Astros cap, grab an old glove, and throw out the first ball. Let him keep the first ball tradition great — an institution and a unifying influence in a nation which is rapidly losing both.”