With his passing at the age of 93 yesterday, Gerald Ford is being remembered today for his accidental presidency (he was the only US president in history never elected as president or vice president), and for his infamous pardon of Richard Nixon.  But we should also take time to remember Ford as a sportsman and a baseball fan.

Although Ford is best remembered for his football exploits (he was a football star at Michigan in the 1930s), it is a little known fact that he was an even bigger baseball fan, and his dream growing up had been to become a professional baseball player:

“I had a life-long ambition to be a professional baseball player, but nobody would sign me.”

When Ford returned home from his service in the Navy during World War II, he became a huge fan of Women’s professional baseball.  While the men had been away fighting, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League had started up (as immortalized in the film A League of Their Own) and was still flourishing.  Ford’s hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan had its own team, the Grand Rapids Chicks, and Ford wooed his future wife Betty by taking her to Chicks games. Later Ford was often heard to remember those games fondly:

“Those gals played hard and skillfully and always put on a good show.”

In 1948, Ford was elected to Congress, and soon became the star catcher of the Republican baseball team.  You see, back in those days baseball was so popular, that every year the Democratic congressmen would play a baseball game against the Republican congressmen on the Washington Senator’s home grounds, complete with uniforms and and large crowds. At right, Ford is pictured conferring with his batterymate, pitcher Glenn Davis (R-Wis), prior to the 1949 Republican/Democrat Game.  As to why he was always the catcher, Ford said,

“I usually play the outfield, but everybody else refuses to catch so I’m stuck.”

As vice president, Ford was present at the game when Henry Aaron hit home run number 715 to break Ruth’s all-time record, and actually threw out the first pitch of that contest (pictured above).  There was actually a minor battle of wills at the time between Reds GM Dick Wagner and Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn over whether the game would be interrupted to allow Ford to go onto the field and shake Aaron’s hand, but ultimately Kuhn prevailed and Ford was allowed to shake Aaron’s hand.

As president, Ford threw out the first two pitches at the 1976 All-Star Game, showing his versatility by throwing first righthanded to NL catcher Johnny Bench, and then lefthanded to AL catcher Carlton Fisk. No doubt remembering his own enjoyment of women’s pro baseball, Ford also signed into law a bill forcing Little League Baseball to allow girls to play ball.

And finally, of course, no piece on Gerald Ford would be complete without at least one of his trademark dumb Gerald Ford quotes, and there is indeed a good one having to do with the sport with which this blog is concerned:

“I watch a lot of baseball on the radio.”

Rest in peace, # 38!

Today former Giants shortstop Jose Uribe passed away at the untimely age of 47, following a car accident in his native Dominican Republic.

I have memories of Uribe from my childhood, even though he played for the hated Giants. He was beloved by the San Francisco fans for his bubbly personality and his unusual last name. I can still remember how whenever he came up, the old Candlestick crowd used to go into a frenzy, shouting YUUUUUUUU-RIBE! over and over while he was at bat, until he eventually and inevitably struck out to end the rally.

Uribe was an exceedingly mediocre shortstop, posting a career average of .241 with only 19 home runs in parts of 10 major league seasons. He was a fixture in the eight spot in the lineup, and his career OPS came out to an astonishingly low .614.  Still, Uribe was good enough to beat out the even more pathetic Johnnie LeMaster to be the shortstop on the Giants’ All-80’s team which was announced a few years back.

A funny story about Uribe was when he was first acquired by the Giants as the ”player to be named later” in a deal with the St. Louis Cardinals. In between the time the trade was made and the time he was announced as the player to be named, the then “Jose Gonzalez” legally changed his name to “Jose Uribe”, and thus actually was “named later” as the joke went.  Thenceforth, he was often jokingly known as Jose “Named Later” Uribe.

When asked why he changed his name, Uribe said it was because he wanted to stand out and make his mark, but to do so he needed a new name, since “There are too many Gonzalezes in baseball!”

He was right.  There are many, many Gonzalezes in baseball, but there will only ever have been one Jose Uribe.

In September, the New York Times announced they had discovered a treasure in the form of Silas Simmons, the oldest living baseball player.

Nobody knew that Simmons, a former Negro League player, was still alive until this summer, when a genealogist near the nursing home where he lived in St. Petersburg alerted a Negro leagues expert.

You can read about Simmons again in today’s edition of the New York Times — in the obituary section. Simmons passed away Sunday at his nursing home. He was 111.

A Philadelphia native, Simmons was a left-handed pitcher for the local Germantown Blue Ribbons beginning in either 1912 or 1913, in the primordial and poorly recorded days of organized black baseball. He played for Germantown and other clubs for many years after that, including the New York Lincoln Giants of the Eastern Colored League in 1926 and the Negro National League’s Cuban Stars in 1929.

Simmons told the Times that he thought he was good enough to play in the Major Leagues, but that he never bothered to try out, because he wouldn’t have been given a fair chance.

“A lot of good black players, but they couldn’t play in the league,” he said. “So that was it. After Jackie Robinson came up, they found out how good they were and started recruiting. You have to give them a chance to play.

“Negroes had a lot of pride. They felt like baseball, that was the greatest thing in the world for them. You had some great players in those days. Biz Mackey. Pop Lloyd. Judy Johnson. Scrappy Brown, the shortstop. We played against all those players.”

Now that Simmons is no more, we are left wondering who is the new oldest living player? It could be any one of a number of guys that nobody’s ever heard of, but my money is on Edgar Renteria.