Awesome book! It was interesting to read about how important baseball was to the Presidents, despite political affiliation. This book reinforced the idea that baseball is America’s pastime!

Two of the most American of institutions are the Presidency and the game of baseball. They have been intertwined together for over a century – from Abraham Lincoln playing “town ball” to Barack Obama writing “Go Sox!” in the visitor book at the Baseball Hall of Fame, there are many stories of what the game has meant to Presidents. They are captured in this wonderful book by Curt Smith, a former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush.

Every story that has been passed down through the generations is shared here. The book may disprove a myth such as William Howard Taft inventing the seventh inning stretch, which did not happen. It may explain in more detail about well-known events as Commissioner Landis did offer to suspend baseball before Franklin Roosevelt wrote the “Green Light Letter”. Or, the reader may learn a new fact like this: Calvin Coolidge was not the baseball person in his family as that was his wife Grace who was the scorekeeper at the University of Vermont and kept a perfect scorecard at each game she and her husband attended. Even bigger surprises may be found in the book, such as learning that Donald Trump was actually a good ballplayer.

One other interesting fact is that the first President to attend a baseball game at any level was Andrew Johnson. Also in the nineteenth century, Benjamin Harrison became the first President to attend a professional baseball game. Once the calendar turns to the 20th century, Smith covers each president from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump by describing not only that man’s connection to baseball, but also a little bit about each man’s term in office and the accomplishments.

The book stays politically neutral with two notable exceptions. One is that Smith has much respect for his former boss as he looked fondly back at George H.W.Bush. The best baseball story for him is a “summit” he called in 1991 with Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio to honor the 50th anniversary of their achievements of 1941 – Williams hitting .406 and DiMaggio’s 56 game hitting streak. Why this was called a “summit” is that after the speeches in the Rose Garden, the President and his two guests flew to Toronto in Air Force One to meet Canadian Prime Minister before that year’s All-Star game.

The one area where there is really no neutrality is that Smith felt that when Washington D.C. lost its major league team (twice) Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon did not do enough to stop the teams from leaving. They were the men in the White House when the first team left after the 1960 season for Minnesota and the second team, an expansion team awarded to Washington to ease the pain, left after the 1971 season.

This is just a very small sample of the many stories connecting baseball and the presidency. Even Presidents whose reputation for sport lies elsewhere, such at Theodore Roosevelt and Gerald Ford in football, the reader will lean how each president has a baseball connection. This book is rich with so many stories, it is one that is very hard to put down. Baseball fans, history buffs and political junkies will all love this book.

I wish to thank University of Nebraska Press for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

A very good (but long) book about US Presidents and baseball. It was as a great read with lots of great information on how the two live up to each other.

Are you interested in the Office of the President in the United States? Are you interested in the sport of baseball? If you answered yes to both of these questions, or even just one of them, then this book is for you. From stories you probably know like the first presidential first pitch and George W. Bush's first pitch in a post 9/11 United states, to the lesser known disdain Teddy Roosevelt had for baseball, you will learn quite a bit about how MLB and the president have interacted throughout time.

I received a free Kindle copy of The Presidents and the Pastime by Curt Smith courtesy of Net Galley  and University of Nebraska Press, the publisher. It was with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and my fiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus pages.

I requested this book as I am a fan of baseball and american history and the description made this book sound interesting. This is the first book by Curt Smith that I have read.

I had high hopes for this book, but the author's writing style and tendency, particularly in the latter chapters where the reader is more familiar with the subject, to drone on made this a less enjoyable read than it could have been. The book covers the span of Presidents from Lincoln to Trump and does reveal some new information, but most of it is well known  to hard core baseball fans.

I suggest that if you decide to read this book that you take it in small doses over a period of time as it can get mind numbing if one tries to read it in a brief period of time.

The Presidents and the Pastime by Curt Smith gives a terrific overview of how Baseball came to be the great American pastime sport. It was fun reading about all the different kinds of opinions that each of the presidents had about the game. I also learned a great deal of information about each of the presidents that I did not know before reading this book as well. If someone is looking to just learn about the presidents, this would be a good book to recommend. There is so much great information about each of the presidents in the book that it makes for a great starting point to learn about them. There is also a lot of information about all of the wars that the presidents and baseball had to deal with.I loved reading about FDR. He is one of my all time favorite Presidents. It was really interesting to read about how Baseball handled WWII. I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of Baseball, but I do like watching a game every now and then. I was always curious about history of baseball. I'm glad I found this book on Netgalley. I'm really enjoyed reading about the history behind baseball and the presidents.

This extraordinary look at both baseball and the presidency, and how the two are intertwined, starting with Teddy Roosevelt to the present, could well be my favorite book of the year.

Amazing and fascinating detail of how the presidents related to the game. Smith didn't just explore whether the president's threw out first pitches, as presidents are known to do, but rather delved further into whether they were fans, played the game, which teams they liked, even the extent to which their wives and/or families were baseball fans, all put into historical context. Some of the details are already pretty well known, like FDR's "green-light letter" allowing the MLB to continue during World War 2, or George W. Bush and the return of baseball at Yankee Stadium after 9/11. Other portions were not nearly as well known.

I've read more than 300 baseball books thus far and Curt Smith is among the very best authors on our National Pastime. I used to think that Mead and Dickson's Baseball: The President's Game was the definitive book on the subject, but not anymore. This is it.

Highly recommended!! An outstanding book that is meant to be savored.