President Donald Trump said Sunday that he would not pitch the first pitch in a New York Yankees game in mid-August, and promised to do so later in the baseball season.
Trump said on Twitter that he cannot make it to New York on August 15 because of his “strong focus” on the White House response to the new coronavirus pandemic.
In a briefing on the White House coronavirus on Thursday, the president told reporters that he accepted an invitation from Yankees President Randy Levine to hold the pregame ceremony. The team subsequently confirmed that Trump would launch the ceremonial launch sometime this season, according to ESPN.
Trump has yet to launch a first launch since he took office, and he is running out of time on his tenure to extend a presidential tradition that dates back to William Howard Taft in 1910. Since then, each president has honored at least one time in a big league game. Trump and Jimmy Carter are the only ones who never did on opening day.
Trump noted Thursday that there would be no crowd at Yankee Stadium, referring to the fact that fans have been banned from attending MLB games, as well as games in many other major sports leagues, to help curb the spread of the new coronavirus.
After closing spring training in mid-March, the MLB shortened its regular season this year to 60 games, its smallest slate since 1878. The season began Thursday with a matchup between the Yankees and the Washington Nationals, during the which the first launch was launched. by Anthony Fauci, the Trump Administration’s top infectious disease official.
With the national rate of new coronavirus cases rising sharply from mid-June to mid-July and deaths in the United States rapidly approaching 150,000, Trump has garnered strong disapproval in surveys of his handling of the pandemic. The president has recently made some notable concessions to the coronavirus crisis, such as wearing a mask in public for the first time and canceling Republican National Convention activities scheduled for next month in Jacksonville, Florida.
On Sunday, Trump turned to Twitter to describe his coronavirus-related efforts as keeping him too busy to travel to New York next month. In one of his tweets on Saturday, he praised his golf partner that day, former NFL quarterback Brett Favre, saying that the Hall of Fame member “hits him a lot.”
A frequent and vehement critic of NFL players’ protests against racial injustice and police brutality, because he takes offense that they took place during the national anthem, Trump returned to that topic on Tuesday, after members of the San Francisco Giants knelt before an MLB exhibition game.
“Looking forward to living sports,” Trump tweeted, “but every time I see a player kneeling during the National Anthem, a sign of great disrespect for our country and our flag, the game ends for me!”
In the MLB season opener of the season on Thursday, all members of the Yankees and Nationals knelt while holding a black cloth before standing up again during the anthem. Two Yankees players, Giancarlo Stanton and Aaron Hicks, knelt during the anthem before a game Saturday in National Park, three miles from the White House.
“I am a black man living in the United States,” Hicks quoted the New York Daily News after the game. “I feel that for me, I should be judged by my character and not by my skin tone. So growing up, that’s what happened. . . . It’s kind of hard to talk about, especially when it’s my life, you know? All I want is to be treated the right way. And that’s all I ask for.
Stanton, who said he would continue to kneel, was asked Saturday night about the possibility that Trump would launch the first pitch in the Yankees’ home game on August 15 against the Boston Red Sox.
“I am not positive, but that is not certain,” Stanton replied. “But at the same time, we will get there when we get there. I mean, that’s in August. It is not something I need to worry about now. ”
When the Nationals played in the World Series last year, Trump said he would not want to throw the first pitch in one of Washington’s home games.
“They have to dress me in a lot of heavy armor. I will look very heavy,” he said at the time.
Trump made an appearance in a luxury suite in Nationals Park during Game 5 of the championship series. When the president was announced to the crowd in the third inning, he was booed out loud.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Bronx County President Ruben Diaz, both Democrats, criticized the Yankees over the weekend for inviting Trump to launch a first pitch.
“After CONDEMNING racism, the next step is not to invite him to his pitcher’s mound,” Blasio tweeted Saturday. “To the players who knelt for the [Black Lives Matter] move, we applaud you. For executives who have aligned themselves with hate, you are on the wrong side of history and morality. “
There was no immediate word on whether the White House and the Yankees had agreed on a later date. The MLB regular season is slated to end on September 27, with an expanded 16-team postseason beginning on September 29.
