Will the Astros Enjoy White House Magic?

On Monday afternoon, the Astros had an off day before the start of a series in Baltimore, so they did what most defending World Series champions have done under those circumstances, and swung by the White House. There, Dusty Baker and his merry men were fêted by President Joe Biden, who commiserated with the beloved Astros manager over having to wait decades to reach the pinnacle of their respective professions.

What a lovely event, one that raises two questions. First: What the hell, Mr. President, I thought you were a Phillies fan? Between this and the similar ceremony for the Braves a year ago, Biden has used two of his three championship soirees to celebrate a hated division rival and the team that beat the Phillies in the World Series. The Bidens are already on thin ice after the First Lady showed up to watch a white-hot Phillies team in Game 4 of the World Series, only for them to get no-hit and lose three straight to end the season.

That leads into the second question: Encountering a sitting president has to be a provocative experience, even for a professional athlete. What effect does going to the White House have on a defending World Series champion?

Baseball teams have been coming to the White House for various reasons since the 1860s, but the first major league team to be invited to the White House for the specific purpose of celebrating their achievements was the 1924 Washington Senators. In more than two decades of existence, the Senators had never won the pennant, nor had they ever really been in position to do so; with the team in first place and about to leave on its season-ending road trip, President Calvin Coolidge brought them in to congratulate them on a good season and wish them good luck down the stretch.

The Senators, of course, went on to win one of the greatest World Series of all time a month later, and in September 1925, Coolidge brought them back to congratulate them on clinching back-to-back pennants.

The presidency and baseball have been closely intertwined for more than a century. President William Howard Taft is credited with inventing the ceremonial first pitch. Herbert Hoover was a baseball nut who went to every Senators home opener while he was in office, and made the trip up… well, I guess they didn’t have Amtrak or I-95 as such back then, so he would’ve had to take a covered wagon or some such to Philadelphia to watch the Athletics in the World Series in 1929, 1930, and 1931.

For most of baseball history, the president glommed on to the Senators as the de facto home team of the presidency. (Though it is delightfully ironic that the chief executive would be attached to a ballclub named after the legislature.) But as both baseball and the presidency came to involve the whole country in the 1960s, presidents became more openly partisan fans. Lyndon Johnson traveled to Texas for the first game in the Astrodome, while Richard Nixon made multiple trips to Anaheim to see Angels games during his administration. Baseball Almanac has a list of every professional baseball game attended by a sitting president; I particularly enjoyed the entry on Gerald Ford.

I had been operating under the mistaken assumption that when Coolidge jumped on the Senators bandwagon, he had kicked off a consistent run of World Series winners going to the White House, but apparently not. As involved as certain presidents have been with the sport, the White House visit as we know it was invented during the 1980s. Minutes after the Detroit Tigers won the World Series in 1984, President Ronald Reagan called Tigers manager Sparky Anderson to congratulate him. The following year, he invited the Kansas City Royals to celebrate with him in person.

That figures. It truly beggars belief how many of our national political conventions and social customs are treated as if they were handed down to George Washington on stone tablets, but were in fact invented out of thin air during the Reagan Administration. That’s because Reagan, or at least his handlers and functionaries, understood the value in tying the image of the president to any image of American success.

As far as I know, Reagan had no particular affinity toward the Tigers, Royals, or any of the other teams that came to the White House at his invitation. But by bestowing accolades upon the World Series champion, the president not only gets to bask in the reflected glory of that achievement, but he gets to enlarge himself. It must take a truly exalted personage to grant laurels to people who already have the exalted status of world champion.

It’s good politics, in other words. And every president since has copied Reagan’s example.

At first, the custom was to invite the World Series winner to Washington during the offseason, usually immediately after the World Series or just before the team reconvened for the preseason:

But in the past 25 years or so, a midseason visit has emerged as a viable option for a defending champion. The late-90s Yankees bucked tradition when they won their four titles in five years. The Bronx Bombers skipped the customary trip to Washington after their first title in 1996; venerable D.C. journalist Dave McKenna reported a rumor that World Series MVP John Wetteland refused to be hosted by President Bill Clinton. The Yankees followed that up in June 1999 by becoming the first defending champ since Coolidge’s Senators to visit in midseason. That event produced this iconic image of then-First Lady Hillary Clinton in a Yankees cap as she prepared to run for one of New York’s seats in the actual U.S. Senate. That’s probably the closest we’ve come to having a sitting president congratulate their favorite team on a World Series win. Which is not what I would’ve expected, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was (puts on Joey Votto voice) Mr. New York City, with his Fifth Avenue ties, his crisp pocket squares, his tailored suits, and his polished shoes. And even though he was in office during a time of dominance by the Yankees, he never crossed paths with them in an official capacity.

The Yankees skipped the Clinton White House again after their 1999 World Series triumph, but returned to visit George W. Bush in early 2001. The World Series champion has gone to the White House at some point every season since then, often as not in the middle of the year.

Usually the ceremony comes as the team is headed in or out of Baltimore or Washington, though the Giants hit the White House on the way to Philadelphia after all three of their titles in the 2010s. Everyone swaps their sliding shorts for a jacket and tie, the president gives a speech in the Rose Garden and receives a jersey from the manager and/or team captain, and everyone goes back to the East Room for hors d’oeuvres. An easy, and memorable, afternoon.

But then, usually 24 hours later, the team has to go play a game. How does the adrenaline rush of meeting the president compare to a weeknight snoozefest against the Nats?

Let’s check the historical record. Between midseason White House visits and games from the Baseball Almanac list, I was able to find 30 “first encounters” between a sitting president and a defending World Series champion. Some presidents in the first half of the 20th century just went to a bunch of Senators games, so for consistency’s sake I decided only to count games that met two criteria: they took place in a season when the defending champion did not make a White House visit, and they were the president’s first trip to see the defending champion that year.

So Dwight Eisenhower’s trip to Game 1 of the 1956 World Series counts, but George W. Bush’s first pitch in Game 3 of the 2001 World Series doesn’t, because he’d already had the Yankees over in May. (I’m also counting the Cubs’ June 2017 trip to see President Donald Trump, even though they’d gone to the White House in the last days of the Obama administration six months prior.)

That gives us a sample of 14 in-season White House visits, plus 16 regular season and postseason games, spread out over the course of 113 years. A bulletproof statistical sample if ever I saw one.

In the interest of predicting what effect Biden will have on the Astros, I’m curious about two things. First, does the defending World Series champion win its next game after meeting the president? And second, what effect does that meeting have on the team for the rest of the season? I’ve measured the latter by taking the difference between the team’s winning percentage before the meeting and the team’s winning percentage afterward.

One final note: Included in the sample of 30 first encounters are four Opening Day appearances and one World Series appearance, leaving me with no data either before or after the meeting to compare the team’s performance to. So while those five encounters are included in the overall data set, what follows is a list of the 25 encounters that had regular-season games before and after. Increases in winning percentage are tagged in red, decreases in blue, no change in gold:

In the 25 times the defending champion has met the president for the first time in the middle of the season, the team has improved its winning percentage 16 times and reduced it eight. The 2016 Royals, steady as ever, were a .500 team before they met President Obama, and they were a .500 team afterward. The Even Year Nonsense Giants met Obama three times and got worse twice. Perhaps they were nonplussed about meeting POTUS, because their bench coach was Ron Wotus. (A Google search reveals no evidence of a “When Wotus met POTUS” headline from the time. Either I’ve committed a grave oversight, or Grant Brisbee is not the man I had believed him to be.)

You’ll notice that a few of these meetings took place either at the very beginning or very end of the season, which would lend itself to extreme swings in win percentage. But even if you eliminate encounters that take place in the first 10% or last 10% of the season, the defending champion that meets the president increases its winning percentage 12 times, against five decreases and, again, the 2016 Royals.

Of those 18 teams, the 2017 Cubs seemed to have gotten the most out of their White House visit. They came to see President Trump at almost exactly midseason, having played .500 ball over 78 games. After leaving the White House, they were a .616 team. That was good enough to win the NL Central by six games, whereas a .500 record would’ve landed them in third place. Good thing they double-dipped. (I’ll refrain from attempting a comedy impression here. But please feel free to imagine, on your own time, Trump’s reaction to learning he has the power to fix a struggling baseball team.)

Only two presidents have had a negative effect, in total, on the teams they’ve met. After Coolidge brought the Senators back over to his place in 1925, they had just one series left in the season, and they got swept. Afterward, they lost the World Series in seven games to Pittsburgh. And honestly, that’s in keeping with the general vibe of a president best remembered as the laconic grouch who handed the building blocks for the Great Depression to Hoover.

The other is Barack Obama, who has as many first encounters with defending champions (seven) as any other two presidents combined. Before meeting Obama, defending World Series champions had a winning percentage of .517; afterward, .516. #ThanksObama.

Good news for the Astros abounds on three fronts. First, the post-White House visit effect for Joe Biden is an increase in winning percentage of .069, the highest of any president who’s met multiple world champions:

Second, World Series winners who met the president for the first time are 19-11 all-time in their next game. Third, the overall White House effect for such teams, over a sample of more than 3,000 games, is an increase of .013 in winning percentage.

That might not sound like much, but that’s more than two games over a full season. A 2.1 WAR player is worth almost $17 million, if you want to get right down to it and use $/WAR. Think about the lengths teams go to achieve marginal gains, the data they collect and the people they have to bring in to crunch it. If you can get an extra two wins by just going to the White House and giving an old politician a custom jersey, that seems like the biggest bargain in baseball. Getting Justin Verlander back is great, but shaking hands with the president is an advantage every other team should envy.