Donald Trump's sports tweets: No love for Michael Vick or A-Rod, wants Pete Rose in Hall of Fame

Jesse Spector

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Donald Trump's sports tweets: No love for Michael Vick or A-Rod, wants Pete Rose in Hall of Fame image

Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency has been one of the most contentious in American history, so today, with the election upon us, let us stick to sports.

MORE: Sports figures who support Donald Trump

Namely, Trump's hot Twitter takes on sports. We know a lot about what The Donald has said about matters of policy, but what about sports? Quite a lot, actually. 

OK, that's still really politics. And having taken a stand against Cubs ownership in 2016, well, not the best look! Sad!

LeBron James has spent time actively campaigning for Hillary Clinton in the past week. Uh, how about another sport?

This was after the Jets lost 31-0 to the Chargers, a game in which they had 60 passing yards as a team using both Geno Smith and Michael Vick. The 2014 Jets were pretty horrendous all around, though, and this seems mostly about being against Vick, given previous Trump tweets.

The 2012 Eagles were, like the 2014 Jets, a garbage fire.

This was actually true. The 2013 Eagles went to the playoffs after Nick Foles took over as quarterback. Maybe Trump had some savvy about football! Too bad he quit watching it.

Again, we see a man who's on top of things, calling the NFL's ratings drop two years before it happened. But when it came time to "focus on other things," Trump wasn't just talking about his future in politics. His true sporting love, for years, has been baseball.

Let's take a look at Trump's takes on the game.

There is nothing to argue about here. It's proof that no matter what your views are, Mariano Rivera is unquestionably an all-time great.

That night, A-Rod went 0 for 3. Raul Ibanez pinch-hit for him, hit a game-winning homer in the ninth inning, then the game-winning homer in the 12th. The Yankees took a 2-1 series lead on the Orioles, and went on to win the ALDS in five games.

Then, however, Trump went off the rails, tapping into a vein of the richest delusions of talk radio about the Yankees, starting with A-Rod.

The guy you think is terrible and can't play without drugs should go to a much more difficult defensive position, which he hasn't played in nearly a decade, to get confidence? OK.

Ah, there it is, the "if George were alive" gambit, a favorite of Yankees fans and commentators who have built up The Boss as the sort of mythic and infallible figure that the Republican Party has turned Ronald Reagan into. Even when there is no evidence that the deceased leader would agree with your position, there's no way to refute it, and you're arguing a position of presumed authority!

This wasn't the only time Trump would invoke Steinbrenner, who, lest we forget, was pardoned by Reagan for his felony obstruction of justice charge stemming from illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon.

You may notice that a lot of Trump's Steinbrenner-theorizing talk had to do with A-Rod. Trump really, really, really, really does not like A-Rod.

The ties of A-Rod to politics are mind-blowing, but not as much as Trump's amazing baseball analysis.

Youkilis played 20 more games as a major leaguer after that, getting 12 hits and no homers with 22 strikeouts.

Trump has not tweeted about A-Rod since his return from suspension. He has, however, still paid attention to baseball.

Well, maybe that's not so much a baseball tweet as one about a newspaper Trump doesn't get along with. When Trump has tweeted about the Mets, it's been almost exclusively about David Wright.

Ah, "my friend," a sobriquet normally reserved for the other captain in New York.

That's not about baseball at all. It's about Trump. Let's get that real baseball talk.

Except, Trump wasn't right. When Tim Hudson left Game 7 of the 2014 World Series in the second inning, it was a 2-2 game. Jeremy Affeldt provided 2.1 innings of brilliant work out of the bullpen, and because Bruce Bochy had not started Madison Bumgarner, he still had his best pitcher available to work more important innings as the game went on. Bumgarner's Average Leverage Index in that game, according to Baseball Reference, was 2.01, higher than any other game and the highest-leverage outing of five innings or more of any pitcher ever in Game 7 of a World Series.

Had Bochy started Bumgarner on two days' rest, what might he have done in the late innings of that game? Trump may have celebrated being right, but he was as wrong as wrong could be.

Bruce Bochy for president. So what if he was born in France?

OK, sorry, that got political. One more thing, though: What is Trump's biggest baseball cause?

Just hard work and talent and breaking the cardinal rule of baseball, then voluntarily agreeing to a lifetime ban as his penalty.

Jesse Spector