stoopidstats: what players lasted for the most presidents?

 There's a member of the Twitterati whom I follow, who goes by the name of PrezWisdom*. You can find him here. As near as I can tell, his three main interests are (not necessarily in order) presidential history, baseball and Cleveland sports. We sometimes chat presidential trivia, and sometimes baseball. And when it's baseball, it somehow gets to stoopidstats.

So he asked me if I know what's the most presidents spanned by any one baseball player's major league career. He threw out several names of players whose careers spanned seven presidencies, but he wondered if there were any players whose careers spanned eight or more presidents. He knew that such a question would pique my interest. And, with the aid of a downloadable baseball database, I had at it.

I found two players -- Jim O'Rourke and Arlie Latham -- whose careers spanned nine presidencies. And there are three -- Dan Brothers, Cap Anson and Nick Altrock -- whose careers spanned eight presidencies. Unfortunately, things are never quite that easy, and the answer is subject to two questions of how to count:

• Suppose a player took off some years before coming back, and those off-years included the full term of a President's administration. Do you count that President? To illustrate with a hypothetical, suppose a player made his debut in 1976 (when Gerry Ford was president), then didn't play again until 1981 (when Ronald Reagan was president). Do we consider his career as spanning three presidents (Ford, Carter, Reagan) or only two (Ford, Reagan). I prefer to say three, but it's purely a definitional issue and I can see an argument for two.
• Grover Cleveland served two nonconsecutive presidential terms. By most reckoning, these are considered two separate presidencies. For these purposes, are they two presidencies or one? I prefer to say two.

In the chart below, I list all players whose careers spanned at least seven presidencies (by any combination of answers to the above questions). There are 13 players on the list -- if I extended it to six presidencies, there would be another 63 players on the list. For each player, I provided the number of presidents assuming all four combinations of answers to the two questions.

In the interests of completeness, I note that I used a 2019 database. One might wonder if counting players' activity in 2020 or 2021 would change my conclusions. I actually mentioned this to PrezWisdom in regard to the new season -- anyone playing this year (as I write this, we are in the season's third day) adds another President to his career. But PrezWisdom pointed out that it won't affect the longest spans. We recently had three consecutive two-term Presidents, so anyone playing this year and counting Biden as his seventh President would have had to made his debut no later than 1988. While I don't follow baseball particularly, I would be aware if there were an active player who had played in the 1980s. Similarly, if there had been a player who played last year (and only then added Trump as his seventh president) would mean that he had made his debut no later than 1980 (and not played in 2017-2019). Again, I would have been aware of such a player.

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*No, I don't know his real name.