Steve Garvey is part of a never-ending flow of baseball players turned politicians
On 5 March, former baseball star Steve Garvey made it into the runoff for the US Senate seat from California vacated by the late Dianne Feinstein. Garvey, a conservative Republican, will face Democrat congressman Adam Schiff in the November general election.
Garvey faces an uphill battle in deep-blue California. During debates and public appearances, he’s revealed little knowledge of the issues. He’s relying on his 19 years (1969-87) in the major leagues with the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres to propel his campaign. “It’s time to get off the bench. It’s time to put the uniform on. It’s time to get back in the game,” he said in October when he announced his campaign.
Garvey is one of several hundred former major league ballplayers who have run for public office since the late 1800s. More than 100 of them have been elected to a variety of positions, from city councilman to state legislator. A few former players have even become congressmen, US senators, and governors.
From the late 1800s through the late-1900s, baseball was America’s most popular sport. Then, as now, ballplayers’ celebrity was a real asset for aspiring politicians.
Some excelled in both realms. The best known is Jim Bunning. During his major league career (1955-71) he won 224 games, pitched two no-hitters (including a perfect game), and was a seven-time All-Star. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1996. As a player, Bunning was a leader of the Major League Baseball Players Association. He helped recruit Marvin Miller, the MLBPA’s canny executive director, who transformed it into one of the nation’s most powerful unions.
After retiring from baseball, Bunning, a Republican who had led Athletes for Nixon in 1968, returned to his native Kentucky, was elected to the Fort Thomas city council, served in the US House of Representatives from 1987-99, and then was elected to the US Senate in 1998, where he served two terms.
Despite his union activities as a player, in Congress Bunning was an ardent foe of organized labor, earning a meager 12 (out of 100) lifetime score from the AFL-CIO for his votes on workers’ rights issues. He also backed gun owners’ rights, tax cuts, and the Iraq war, and opposed abortion and same-sex marriage. The National Journal often ranked Bunning as one of the three most conservative senators.
Bunning wasn’t the only Hall of Fame player to run for office, but all of the others – Cap Anson, Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie, Roger Bresnahan, Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, Walter Johnson, and Ernie Banks – struck out as politicians.
Anson, the Chicago White Stockings’ first baseman and manager from 1876 to 1897, was a superstar of his era. But off the field history does not remember him as fondly. Anson led the successful effort to exclude African Americans from big league baseball, which lasted until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Judge Edward Fitzsimmons Dunne, the Democrats’ candidate for Chicago mayor in 1905, put Anson on his ticket as a candidate for city clerk to garner votes from local baseball fans. They both won, but the following year, Anson lost his campaign for sheriff, finishing last among four candidates. That ended his political career.
Wagner, the great Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop (1897–1917), lost his race for Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County sheriff in 1928. Lajoie, a star infielder from 1896 to 1916, lost his campaign for Ohio’s Cuyahoga County sheriff in 1924. Bresnahan, one of baseball’s best catchers in the early 1900s, failed in his bids for Lucas County (Ohio) sheriff in 1932 and county commissioner in 1944.
Johnson, the extraordinary Washington Senators pitcher (1907-27) and manager (1929-32), was a lifelong Republican. After he retired, he lived on his farm in Germantown, Maryland. In 1936, he was elected Montgomery County commissioner. Two years later, Rep Joseph Martin recruited him to run for Congress. Johnson told voters he would “study up on them issues” if he got elected, but he lost. As Martin later explained, “I got some of my boys to write two master speeches for him – one for the farmers of his district and the other for the industrial areas. Alas, he got the two confused. He addressed the farmers on industrial problems, and the businessmen on farm problems.”
Banks, the Chicago Cubs’ first Black player, was so popular that fans called him “Mr Cub.” But that didn’t give Banks the boost he need when he ran for the board of aldermen in 1963. A Republican in an overwhelmingly Democrat city, Banks failed to unseat the incumbent in the city’s south side. He came in third, winning only 12% of the vote. He told a reporter: “Politics is a strange business. They try to strike you out before you ever get a turn at bat.”
Pirates infielder Bill Mazeroski hit the game-winning home run in Game 7 against the Yankees to win the 1960 World Series. But he couldn’t get to first base in politics, failing to win the Democratic nomination for county commissioner in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania in 1987.
Many players emphasized their baseball backgrounds when running for office. The headline in the Muncie (Indiana)Morning Star in April 1936 read, “Vic Aldridge, Ex-Pirate Hurler, Seeks State Senate Nomination.” Aldridge, a Democrat, won the seat and won subsequent reelection bids. In 1944, Republican Mordecai Brown, another Indiana native, and a far superior pitcher, failed to defeat Aldridge. Five years later, however, Brown won another election – to the Baseball Hall Fame.
In 1976, when Pat Jarvis, a former Atlanta Braves pitcher, ran for DeKalb County sheriff in Georgia, he promised to be a “team player” with other law enforcement agencies. Concerned about overcrowding, in 1989 he persuaded voters to pass a bond to build a new county jail. Jarvis served as sheriff until 1995. Four years later he was charged with using his office for financial gain, including $200,000 in kickbacks. He pleaded guilty and served 15 months in federal prison.
After pitching for Brooklyn from 1907 to 1916, Nap Rucker returned home to Roswell, Georgia, and launched a successful business career. He owned a bank, a plantation, a wheat mill, and cotton farms. During the Depression, in 1935 and 1936, Rucker, a Democrat, served as Roswell’s mayor and judge of the police court, all for $100 a year. He brought running water, paved the sidewalks, opened new schools and playgrounds, and created the town’s sewage system, then later served as the town’s water commissioner. He later said, “There is more skullduggery in the average baseball league then there is in small town politics.”
Most of the ex-ballplayers who won public office were hometown heroes, not big stars. New Hampshire native Fred Brown played local semi-pro baseball before playing in the major leagues from 1901-02. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Boston University law school, he was elected mayor of Somersworth from 1914 until 1922, then served as New Hampshire governor from 1923-25. A Democrat, he failed to get his proposals for a progressive tax, abolishing the women’s poll tax, and a 48-hour work week through the Republican legislature. From 1932-39 he represented his conservative state as a pro-New Deal Democrat in the US Senate.
John Tener played in the majors from 1885-90, worked as a banker, was elected to Congress in 1908, then served as Pennsylvania’s governor from 1911 until 1915. One of his claims to fame is having organized the first congressional baseball game in 1909 – now an annual competition that raises money for charity.
A major league pitcher from 1952-62, Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell became a broadcaster for Winston-Salem’s minor league team and worked in public relations for Pepsi-Cola. He was elected chair of the Davidson County Board of Commissions, then served three terms as a Republican congressman from North Carolina. Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush appointed him to jobs in their administrations, including executive director of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.
A so-so major league player (.212 batting average) from 1977-1982, Randy Bass was a big star (.337 batting average) in Japan from 1983-88, one of the few foreign players elected to Japan’s Baseball Hall of Fame. When his baseball days were over, he returned to Lawton, Oklahoma, was elected to the city council in 2001, and then to the state senate from 2005 to 2019. A liberal Democrat in a conservative Republican state, in 2018 Bass was the lone vote (out of 43 senators) to oppose the SelfDefense Act, allowing people to bring guns into houses of worship.
Some players who never went beyond the minor leagues in baseball hit the big leagues in politics.
Frank Lausche played 58 games in the minors in 1916 and 1917, compiling a .218 batting average. He served in the first world war, then quit baseball to attend law school in Cleveland, his hometown. After practicing law, he was elected Cleveland’s mayor (1942-44), Ohio’s governor (1945-47 and 1949-57) and US senator (1957-69). In 1951, baseball’s owners talked to Lausch about becoming baseball commissioner, which paid $65,000 a year, far more than his $13,000 salary as governor. Lausche turned them down.
In 1952, a Pittsburgh Pirates scout, impressed with a young outfielder playing for St John’s University, reported that Mario Cuomo was a great prospect who could “go all the way.” He described Cuomo as “aggressive and intelligent” and “very well-liked by those who succeed in penetrating the exterior shell,” but he “will run over you if you get in his way.” Cuomo dropped out of college to play for the Pirates’ minor league team in Brunswick, Georgia. He was batting .244 after 81 games when he was hit in the head by an errant pitch at a time before players used batting helmets, ending his baseball career. He returned to St John’s, earning undergraduate and law degrees. A liberal
Democrat, he was elected New York’s lieutenant governor in 1978 and governor in 1982, serving three four-year terms.
In 1954, Pete Domenici went 0-1 in three relief appearances for the Albuquerque Dukes in the West TexasNew Mexico League. After earning a law degree and practicing law, he was elected to the Albuquerque city commission in 1966, served three years as the city’s mayor, and was elected as a Republican to the US Senate from New Mexico, serving from 1973 to 2009.
George Hurley played in the minors for one year (1927) when he lost sight in his left eye after he was struck by a fastball. Instead, he went into politics and was an outspoken progressive in the Washington State House of Representatives from 1942-46. During the second world war, he introduced a bill to fund nursery schools for children of defense workers and sponsored another bill to prohibit racial discrimination in hotels and other businesses. His leftwing views, including his support for nuclear disarmament during the cold war, got him labeled as a communist sympathizer and thwarted his reelection bid in 1946. In 1948 he broke away from the Democrats by supporting the Progressive Party’s candidate for president, former vice-president Henry Wallace. He lost five more elections between 1950 and 1963, but in 1974, he was elected to represent Seattle in the legislature and served two more terms as a champion of equal pay for women, a strong opponent of the Vietnam war, and an advocate for unions, protecting state forests, rent control, and government-sponsored health care.
Roger Williams, a Texas Republican, is the only former pro ballplayer currently in Congress, although he never got beyond the low minors. The Atlanta Braves drafted Williams in 1971 after his junior year at Texas Christian University. After three years with Braves’ farm teams, he left to coach the TCU baseball team and take over the family’s car dealership from his father. In 2012 he won a race for Congress and has been reelected five times. Williams is the coach of the Republican team for the annual congressional baseball game.
Peter Dreier is professor of politics at Occidental College and author of Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America, published in 2022.
Isabella Flad and Sarah Jageler provided research assistance for this article.