At least two professional baseball teams wooed Donald Trump when he was a young first baseman at the New York Military Academy, according to a new book.





In the new “The Presidents and the Pastime,” noted sports author Curt Smith writes that both the Philadelphia Phillies and Boston Red Sox tried to grab Trump before going to college. Each time he said no, or as Smith wrote, “He chose ‘real money’ over baseball money.”

Turns out that Trump was the epitome of a baller in the old sense of the word — a scrappy fighter who honed his skill. “Trump resembled Pete Rose via Dustin Pedroia by way of Enos Slaughter — the most never-say-die kid in town,” Smith wrote in a chapter shared with the Washington Examiner.

His book, to be released next week by publisher University of Nebraska, charts the connections between presidents and baseball and noted that Trump hasn’t followed tradition by throwing out an Opening Day first pitch.

Smith didn’t say why. But he perceptively suggested a possibility: As baseball has fallen in popularity, why would Trump waste his time on the pitcher's mound?

“At a time like this, the Donald could affect a rough blue-collar charm appealing to the people who elected him, largely tired of and embittered by being ignored by institutions, especially government. Yet the last irony of his no-first-year first pitch is that it affirmed a similar angst already epidemic among those who follow another institution, baseball, their voices judged unworthy of being heard as the pastime itself has ebbed,” he wrote.