The Presidents and the Pastime attracts on Curt Smith’s extensive background being a former White Home presidential speechwriter to chronicle the historic relationship between baseball, the ‘most American’ sport, as well as the U.S. presidency.

Smith, who USA Today calls ‘America’s tone of voice of power on football broadcasting,’ begins before America’s delivery, when will be presidents played baseball antecedents. He charts how football cemented its reputation as America’s pastime in the nineteenth century, about The Presidents as well as the Pastime: The History of Baseball and the White Home such presidents as Lincoln and Johnson playing city ball or giving employees time off to watch. Smith tracks every U.S. president from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump, each chapter filled up with anecdotes: Wilson buoyed by football after suffering impairment; a heroic FDR conserving baseball in World Battle II; Carter, taught the overall game by his mom, Lillian; Reagan, airing football on radio that he under no circumstances saw by ‘re-creation.’

George H. W. Bush, for whom Smith composed, explains, ‘Baseball provides everything.’ Smith, having interviewed most presidents since Richard Nixon, stocks personal tales on each. Throughout, The Presidents as well as the Pastime provides a riveting narrative of how America’s market leaders have treated football. From Taft as the first president to toss the ‘first pitch’ on Opening Day in 1910 to Obama’s ‘Go Sox!’ scrawled in the guest register in the National Football Hall of Fame in 2014, our presidents have deemed it the quintessentially American sport, enriching both their workplace and the nation.