Watch and Learn

A funny little story about George H.W. Bush, Ted Williams and defending our favorites.

Episode 2 of The Joy of Baseball podcast is out, and it’s a fantastic one: Molly and I talk with Detroit Tigers play-by-play announcer and one of the truly great people in the game, Jason Benetti.

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So, as you know, we don’t do politics here at JoeBlogs. But I just heard a great baseball story about President George H. W. Bush that I think is great fun.

You probably know that 41 — much like his son 43 — was a gigantic baseball fan. He captained the Yale baseball team and played in the first two College World Series.* He followed the game closely for the rest of his life, attended as many Houston Astros games as he could, and became close friends with Ted Williams.

It’s the last of these that leads to our story.

*Here’s some fun trivia: Do you know where the first two College World Series were played? If you said Kalamazoo, Michigan, I mean, you know a lot more about baseball than I do. Yale lost each of the first two in the final — the first year to Cal and the second year to USC. The third College World Series, which was won by Texas, was played in Wichita. And then every CWS since then has been played in Omaha.

Jean Becker was 41’s chief of staff for the last 24 years of his life. She grew up in tiny Martinsburg, Missouri, about 90 miles Northeast of St. Louis, and she attended the University of Missouri, and was such an enormous St. Louis Cardinals fan that she spurned repeated attempts by President Bush to turn her into an Astros fan.

And one day, she read a story — I’d like to believe it was the story I wrote in Sports Illustrated, but I don’t know that — that said that if Albert Pujols stayed healthy, he was on pace to become the greatest hitter in baseball history. You can go back and look at the numbers yourself … through age 29, he was hitting .334/.427/.628 with 387 doubles and 366 home runs. The young Pujols was utterly mind-boggling.

Anyway, she couldn’t WAIT to share that tidbit with President Bush.

It’s fair to say that he did not take it well.

“Pujols,” President Bush told her, “will never, ever be better than Ted Williams.” And he said it, Jean says, “with a hint of disdain in his voice.”

For months, random people would walk up to Jean Becker and say, “did you REALLY tell President Bush that Albert Pujols might be better than Ted Williams?”

“I did,” she said.

“He’s still really mad about it,” they told her.

In 2005 — you had to know where this story was going — the Cardinals played the Astros in the National League Championship Series. In Game 5, the Astros had a 4-2 lead in the ninth, and they had the virtually unhittable Brad Lidge on the mound, and they were on the brink of their first World Series, and Pujols came to the plate with two runners on, and you know what happened next. In WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL, I describe the home run like this: “It was like someone had hit a mute button on the city of Houston.”

Jean was not at the game — she was at home recovering from a hysterectomy.

And she got a text from President Bush.

“I am trying to muster up some sincerity. What a home run by Pujols. I know you are ecstatic and that makes me happy — well, less gloomy. So dear Jean, sleep well, savor your victory. Meet you in St. Louis.”

The Astros went to St. Louis and won and went to the World Series.

But there’s one more addendum to the story. Not long after President Bush died in 2018, Jean was cleaning out her office when she came upon a gift he had given her. President Bush had been invited to the premiere of the HBO documentary on Ted Williams called “There Goes the Greatest Hitter That Ever Lived.” He gave her the invitation. And on a sticky note, the President wrote:

“See, Jean!! Watch and Learn!!”