Barack Obama makes baseball history

Basketball-playing President Barack Obama turned his hand to a different sport last night when he threw out the first pitch for the National League team in the All-Stars Game in St Louis, Missouri.

The left-hander - or southpaw - became the fifth sitting president to take part in the annual showpiece game between stars of the National League and the American League, following Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

But he was the first to do so wearing a White Sox jacket - the Chicago South Side team to which Obama has shown unwavering loyalty before and since entering the White House. "Everybody knows I'm a White Sox fan and my wife thinks I look cute in this jacket," Obama said. "Between those two things, why not?"

Obama had travelled to the game on Air Force One with the legendary New York Giants player, Willie Mays, whose advice to the President was "follow through" - and Obama heeded it well. "I'm just proud of him, you know," said an emotional Mays, who began his professional career in 1947 playing for the Birmingham Black Barons in the segregated Negro Southern League. "He may be proud of something else. But I'm proud of him [and] what he stands for."

Sports commentator Nick Friedell makes the point on the ESPN Chicago site that Obama's appearance as the first black president came only 62 years after Jackie Robinson became the first Major League Baseball player "to break the colour barrier". Said Freidell: "The abuse he [Robinson] took at that time and throughout his career was well-documented, and the idea that an African-American man now holds arguably the most important job in the world must have Robinson smiling somewhere."

Obama has never swayed in his support for the White Sox, who are very much the "second" baseball team in Chicago after the higher-profile Cubs. Obama told Fox TV's Joe Buck during last night's broadcast from the Busch Stadium: "I'm not a Cubs hater... I just don't root for 'em, that's all."

Since wearing a black Sox cap during his presidential campaign last year, it has become one of the nation's best-selling baseball caps. As Friedell said: "His wardrobe choice Tuesday night is going to make the black Sox jacket one of this summer's hottest items." ·