Baseball: a perfect sport for D.C.

National pastime a big hit on high court

First there was John G. Roberts Jr., talking his way to confirmation as chief justice of the United States with the insight that "judges are like umpires."

Then there was Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, explaining last week's indictment of the vice president's chief of staff with a 453-word parable concluding that I. Lewis Libby Jr., the aide, had, in baseball terms, thrown sand in the umpire's eyes.

And Monday, there was the nomination of Samuel Alito, a Philadelphia Phillies fan who told the world that his ambition as a young man had been to become baseball commissioner.

Why are so many Washington figures, including a roster of Supreme Court justices past and present, so devoted to the game? Easy, said Carter G. Phillips, a Washington attorney who has often argued before the court, and an old softball teammate of Alito: "Baseball's the perfect sport for nerds."

"It doesn't require a huge amount of athletic ability to play," Phillips said. "And it's got this cerebral component that appeals to people like Sam."

In the nation's capital, the national pastime is also an inexhaustible motherlode of metaphor and cliche. Perhaps inspired by Washington's return to Major League Baseball after a 34-year absence with the debut of the Nationals, baseball talk is enjoying an especially rich run.

Though he may never get his wish of becoming baseball commissioner, Alito, a federal appeals judge for 15 years, has coached his son's Little League team and in 1994 attended a Phillies "fantasy camp," returning with his own baseball card.

Phillips, who has kept a Sam Alito baseball card on his desk for years, said his friend "was a powerful hitter and pretty good first baseman" when they played softball together in Washington for the Solicitor General's office and later for the law firm of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood. At 55, Alito may not have much game left, Phillips admitted, but his devotion to baseball may give him a slight boost as senators ponder his nomination.

"They'll stop thinking he's some one-dimensional ideologue," Philips said.

The late Justice William J. Brennan Jr. once recalled his own abrupt introduction to the kinship of the nine-judge court to the nine-man sport. Chief Justice Earl Warren took the just-appointed justice to the third floor of the Supreme Court building to introduce him to his new colleagues, Brennan recalled in a 1987 interview with National Public Radio.

"The room was dark, and we put on the light and there they were, all watching the opening game of the 1956 World Series," Brennan said. "I was introduced by the chief to each of them, and someone said, 'Put out the light!' We put out the light, and they went on watching the game."

The same dedication -- to baseball, not to the law -- was evident in a series of notes passed along the bench during an oral argument in 1973 by a law clerk of Justice Potter Stewart, a huge Cincinnati Reds fan with a soft spot for Pete Rose.

The notes, which turned up last year in the papers of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, a Minnesota Twins devotee, reported the score of the New York Mets-Reds game in the National League playoffs -- eventually adding as a footnote the fact that Vice President Spiro T. Agnew had just resigned.

Perhaps the biggest fan on the court today is Justice John Paul Stevens. When the unofficial Supreme Court Web site oyez.org posted a virtual tour of Stevens' chambers, his office requested that the tour include a scorecard and a print of Babe Ruth from the third game of the 1932 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs, which the justice had attended as a boy.

In addition, there's the baseball Stevens keeps on his desk, signed by former Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken Jr., who holds the record for his streak of consecutive games.

Jerry Goldman, a political science professor at Northwestern University and a creator of Oyez Baseball, an online game that combines court facts with baseball trivia, said he thinks the court's senior justice -- who has served 29 years, 10 months and 15 days -- feels a kinship with baseball's Iron Man. "He's 85, he's spry, he's bright, and he'd like to set his own record," Goldman said.