In September 1928, at Griffith Stadium in Washington, Babe Ruth refused to pose for a photograph with the Republican candidate for president, Herbert Hoover. “Nothing doing,” the Babe reportedly said. “I’m for Al Smith.” (Later Ruth issued a statement explaining his brushoff as a “misunderstanding” and said posing with Hoover would be an “honor.”)

When baseball’s most famous player publicly endorsed Smith, the governor of New York, that fall, he became one of the first American sports stars to attempt to lend his popularity to a presidential candidate. Nowadays it is commonplace for a president to want to get close to the day’s sports heroes. But Ruth was the first baseball star who dealt with presidents as a celebrity of near-equal magnitude, and, as it happened, his encounters with half a dozen presidents included one of our own time.

A century ago this October, Woodrow Wilson became the first president to attend a World Series game — in Philadelphia, between the Phillies and the Red Sox. Ruth, then a 20-year-old rookie pitcher for Boston, did not take the mound that day. But in 1928, when the poet Carl Sandburg asked him which of all the presidents was “the best model for boys to follow,” Ruth, a self-proclaimed Democrat, who had grown up poor on the Baltimore waterfront, replied, “President Wilson was always a great friend of mine.”

The New York sportswriter Fred Lieb recalled in his 1977 memoir, “Baseball as I Have Known It,” that during the 1920 presidential campaign, he was asked by cronies of the Republican presidential nominee, Warren Harding, to bring Ruth to Harding’s Ohio front porch for a public endorsement. It was a time of looser journalistic ethics. Lieb wrote, “If I could bring it off, there was $4,000 in it for Babe and $1,000 for me.”