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President Trump Not Throwing Ceremonial First Pitch At Nationals Home Opener, Apparently

The official reason is a scheduling conflict. The actual story... is probably about the same, but let's dig a little deeper anyway.
When you're thinking about that pitch. Photo by Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports

Two months and change into his presidency, it is perhaps too easy to say that Donald Trump has distinguished himself from his predecessors mostly if not entirely through his thermonuclear oafishness. There's an obvious reason for that, but for all his material success in signing executive orders that will restore profit-optimized amounts of mining detritus to Appalachian tap water and his more amorphous achievements in the war against the concept of objective reality, there is one achievement that Trump unquestionably owns at this point in his Presidency. No one that has previously occupied the office has ever made it so clear how difficult even the ostensibly easy stuff about the job is.

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One of the defining attributes of Trump's Presidency has been the speed and strangeness with which apparently simple tasks unfold their manifest difficulty in public. In previous administrations, Presidents have thrown out ceremonial first pitches on Major League Baseball's opening day. Sometimes they have done it well, and sometimes they have done it less well, but never has it seemed like a difficult thing.

But apparently it is! This is the Trump Difference, the speed and strangeness with which things go from this:

We could see Donald Trump throw out the first pitch for the Nationals on Opening Day — Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports)March 28, 2017

To this:

President Donald Trump will NOT throw out the ceremonial first pitch at — 120 Sports (@120Sports)March 28, 2017

…and with no more explanation than an apparently unresolvable scheduling conflict. There are reasonable enough reasons why Trump might not want to throw out the first pitch at a Washington Nationals game, from a fear of looking silly and being booed to an unwillingness to be near Jayson Werth for any significant period of time. There is even the possibility that his Presidential schedule really is too crowded for Trump to make the trip to Nationals Park, let alone throw a pitch and spend an inning bantering in the broadcast booth, as was rumored earlier on Tuesday. But in an administration that has thus far been defined by capriciousness and opacity and a broader funky fug of constant misdirection, it's all kind of hard to credit.

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Trump's greatest gift as a public figure, going back to his early New York days, is to invite speculation, really of any kind. In the case of Trump's first pitch, though, we have real reason to ask questions—not about why he isn't doing it, but about how he is working to make the first pitch, whenever it happens, suitably impressive. Please feel free to read what follows as if it was a threaded string of 71 tweets.

Here is what we know: Trump was apparently once a creditable high school baseball player. As with many other things in his biography, there are questions about the specifics and the volume of exaggeration involved, but his coach at the New York Military Academy, Col. Theodore Dobias, told the Daily Mail that Trump was a fine player, and fine enough to be scouted by the Phillies and Red Sox. We also know that Trump has thrown out first pitches before, at Fenway Park in 2006 and at the Yankees' spring training facility in 2004. We can see, in both those images, that Trump is committed enough to the job to muster up a passable pitchface in the process.

Now, is it as good as Jeff Karstens' indelible, era-defining pitchface?

Jeff Karstens has a face. And we are five weeks away from seeing it play ball. — Scott Landis (@ScottCLandis)February 22, 2013

Not really. Is it up there with R.A. Dickey's signature pitchface, a pitchface so intense that it will cause a Wilhelm Scream to burst from your computer's speakers, unbidden, every time you look at it?

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It's pronounced RAAAAAAHHHHH Dickey. Photo by Neville E. Guard-USA TODAY Sports

No, it's not. Is it up there with Kenta Maeda's maxed-out grimace?

EXERT. Photo by Richard Mackson-USA TODAY Sports

It's not. It's not close.

But do we know—can anyone prove, not in that tendentious tweetstorm guilt-by-association way, but like really prove beyond a doubt—that Trump is not currently working with those pitchers, with the best people, on perfecting a suitable and truly Presidential Pitchface? Beyond the usual media speculation and partisan wishcasting, does anyone know that Trump is not working harder on this than anyone knows, in secret? We don't know it. We can't know it. But we can assume, whenever we finally get to see it, that Trump's first pitch will be unique to him and, in the way that everything he does invariably emerges as an expression of every roiling and un-understood thing inside him, absolutely honest.