Yet another in the No lie is too big or too small to tell category
Trump’s Baseball Boast Gets A Brutal Fact-Check: ‘He Couldn’t F**king Hit
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President Donald Trump has repeatedly bragged about his athletic prowess as a youth, and has even claimed he could’ve played Major League Baseball.
“I was captain of the baseball team,” Trump told MTV in 2010. “I was supposed to be a professional baseball player. Fortunately, I decided to go into real estate instead.”
But Slate found some of his old stats as a player for the New York Military Academy and they don’t exactly scream MLB talent. Partial records uncovered by the website revealed a .138 batting average over the nine games.
One baseball writer who also worked as a scout for the Toronto Blue Jays offered up a blunt assessment when asked if Trump sounded like a prospect.
“There’s no chance,” said Keith Law of The Athletic, adding:
“You don’t hit .138 for some podunk, cold-weather high school playing the worst competition you could possibly imagine. You wouldn’t even get recruited for Division I baseball programs, let alone by pro teams. That’s totally unthinkable. It’s absolutely laughable. He hit .138 — he couldn’t ***** hit, that’s pretty clear.”
.138??? You would probably be benched for even the smallest high schools unless your Daddy was personally financing an expensive school building. In defense of the Easy Out in Chief, it's very difficult to hit well when you are suffering from bone spurs.
It's not like his father had enough money to pay for the Grifter to get foot surgery.
Was Donald Trump Good at Baseball?
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Trump, who played first base, wrote that “being a pro was in the equation” until he attended a tryout with “another young kid named Willie McCovey.” Apparently, the sight of the future Hall of Famer in action convinced him to give up baseball for good.
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Many grown-ups recall high school glory. Far fewer can cite newspaper articles as proof. Except it seems likely that Trump got his own headline wrong—or made it up entirely. After combing the Evening News and the Cornwall Local, the only local newspapers to regularly cover NYMA sports, and doing an extensive search on Newspapers.com, I’ve been unable to find “TRUMP HOMERS TO WIN THE GAME” in any local paper, nor “TRUMP WINS GAME FOR NYMA,” a headline he’d mention to D’Antonio for his book The Truth About Trump.
Perhaps that’s because in 1964, NYMA didn’t play Cornwall High School, according to the schedule in its yearbook. They didn’t play in 1963, either.
What I have been able to find is box scores from some of Trump’s games, and the picture they paint of the player is not pretty.
As for Willie McCovey, he was eight years older than Trump. When Trump was a senior in high school, McCovey was in his fifth year in the major leagues and already an All-Star.
Obviously the Grifter in Chief meant Hall of Famer Willie Mays, not Hall of Famer Willie McCovey.
Or maybe not. Willie Mays had been a star in the major leagues since 1951.
It's not that the Liar in Chief isn't an outstanding athlete in other sports. He's been the club champion at the golf clubs he owns. Sometimes he doesn't even have to have played in the championship tournament. He'll call the golf pro at the club that hosted the tournament, and report that he had a lower score at an entirely different course so he actually won the tournament. What's the problem?