Thee of the Republican Party’s most talented baseball players in elected office walk into a podcast studio, and the rest is the latest episode of the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) Right to the Point podcast, which was obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter ahead of the annual Congressional Baseball Game.
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.) joined Reps. August Pfluger (R., Texas) and Greg Steube (R., Fla.) on the RSC podcast to discuss their predictions for the game, and much more. Schmitt is one of the GOP’s best hitters, and Pfluger — the RSC’s chair — and Steube are the two most recent MVPs of the big game.
Over the years, Schmitt has spoken with the Reporter about why he enjoys joining members of the House for the big game each year, but he explained to Pfluger that love of baseball — and specifically, the St. Louis Cardinals — was a “civic religion” for him growing up. He then played baseball himself in high school and in college, all to prepare him for the big leagues of congressional ball.
“I love the game,” he explained. “And to me, in many ways, it’s sort of like the cadence of the summer. It’s just got a rhythm to it. You can be kind of watching the game, kind of listening to the game. You can go to the game; there’s a pace to it that I love.”
Steube too grew up playing baseball, albeit in “the great state of Florida.”
“Every kid, just about, played baseball or football and played in high school, and I had a lot of opportunities to play in college, but I thought that rodeo was more important than playing baseball, so I decided to do that instead of taking some scholarships.”
Steube noted that he “didn’t even know what the Congressional Baseball Game was until I got elected to Congress, and then Rep. Rodney Davis, when you have the open orientation goes, ‘anybody play baseball?’ And I raise my hand and he says, ‘can you pitch?’ And I said ‘I didn’t pitch, but I can pitch.’ And we went down to the gym, and from that point on, I was apparently the starting pitcher of the Congressional Baseball Game. It’s a lot of fun.”
In the same way that Schmitt has gotten to meet a lot of members of the House through practices and through games, Steube said that he actually got to know Pfluger the best through the baseball game.
“August and I don’t sit on the committees together,” he said, yet “I’ve gotten to know him through playing baseball and going to practice, and you get a good relationship with other members because of going to practice and playing on the game, playing on the team that you wouldn’t otherwise get.”
That type of friendship, Schmitt echoed, is “not transactional or political or something like that.” Rep. Roger Williams (R., Texas), the GOP’s coach, is “a taskmaster with” the early mornings, which Pfluger called “painful.”
Nevertheless, Schmitt says that Williams “does a great job.”
For Pfluger, playing in a Major League stadium is a dream come true. “As a kid growing up in West Texas, I had a grandfather who played at the University of Texas, an uncle who played in the Red Sox system. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to play baseball, and I played a little bit in college. But I wasn’t good enough to ever make it to those next levels.” Every year now, however, he gets that opportunity.
For Schmitt too, “this is what I really wanted to do with my life.” He enjoys it even though he normally plays out in left field, which is where the Democrats congregate in the audience.
The game gives lawmakers the opportunity to make friends — but also to make headlines that they never thought possible.
“I never thought as a member of Congress that I would be on ESPN’s top ten, but that was obviously a huge, a huge moment,” Steube said of his performances that led to him getting national sports coverage. “I wasn’t even thinking about a home run when I walked up to the plate. And it was actually funny because Joe Biden had walked onto the field right before that, and I had to rest; that rest gave me the opportunity to kind of regroup because I’d just come off the mound. You’ve got the then-president on the field when I hit the home run.”
Pfluger recounted his experience of that Steube home run, which happened when Biden was in the GOP dugout, of all places. “He’s in the dugout when this happened,” Pfluger says. “The president says ‘what happened? Do we get a touchdown?’ And Steve [Scalise] turns to me. He goes, ‘Mr. President, you are welcome in our dugout anytime.’”
While the Republicans conceded that Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D., Calif.) is one of the Democrats’ best players, they could barely hide their excitement at the prospect of Mark Teixeira winning a seat in Texas and joining the GOP team next year.
“Mark Teixeira will be a good addition to the team,” Steube said, “although the Democrats have said that they probably won’t pitch to him. They’ll just walk him. Well, you can’t walk all of us…That’s just weak. But it’s a game for charity. At least pitch the guy, let him hit them out.”
“We want to win 100 to nothing,” Schmitt said he told Sen. Alex Padilla (D., Calif.), reflecting on what is possible when Teixeira joins.
