MVN - Most Valuable Network

Nationals Decline Opportunity To Mock President Bush

When it was announced that President Bush would toss the ceremonial first pitch at Sunday night’s grand opening game of the Washington Nationals’ new stadium, an interesting question was raised: Who would he throw this pitch to?

At first glance, you’d probably expect that the Washington catcher would be on the receiving end of this pitch. But there’s one minor problem with that: The Nationals catcher, Paul Lo Duca, was mentioned in the Mitchell Report a whopping 37 times. And then consider that Bush strongly denounced steroid usage in his 2004 State of the Union address, and called for performance enhancing drugs to be eliminated from sports.

So, those of us who enjoy poking fun at the President were pretty excited about this ceremonial first pitch: The possibility of Bush throwing the pitch to someone who had considerable involvement in the Steroids Era of baseball seemed almost too good to be true.

However, although this situation had “PR disaster” written all over it for Bush, the general manager of the Nats, Jim Bowden, recently informed Lo Duca that Washington manager Manny Acta will instead be catching the President’s pitch.

Remember the date, folks: March 30, 2008 — a day when President Bush actually avoided a poor PR move.

A White House spokesman claimed that the administration had nothing to do with the decision to make Acta the recipient of the pitch — supposedly, the Nationals had full control over the matter.

Gimme a break…this decision has the White House’s fingerprints all over it. Bud Selig might have also played a role in the move. But either way, the right decision was made…the President avoided looking worse than he already does, and I suppose that’s a pretty damn good accomplishment for him.

Hat tip: FanIQ

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.