Congress Baseball Game Raises $3.2M for DC Charities

When Fox News correspondent Chad Pergram sat down to announce this year's Congressional Baseball Game, he faced a puzzle no other sportscaster deals with: three players wearing number 12, three wearing number 3, and two sharing nearly every other digit. Welcome to the only baseball game where you can't tell the players even with a scorecard.

The annual showdown between Republican and Democratic lawmakers isn't your typical charity event. Dating back to 1909, it's the longest-running tradition of its kind, and this year it drew 32,000 fans to Nationals Park while raising over $3.2 million for DC nonprofits.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Rep. Brad Finstad both chose number one for the GOP team. Democrats had their own jersey chaos, with four sets of matching numbers across the roster. Since this is Congress, everyone gets to pick whatever number they want, regardless of baseball tradition.

For Pergram, who has announced the game on Fox Sports for five years alongside play-by-play veteran Kevin Corke, the challenge goes beyond duplicate numbers. Unlike announcing actual Major League games where stats and scouting reports fill broadcast time, here he's researching voting records instead of batting averages.

The Ripple Effect

The quirky tradition brings something rare to Washington: genuine bipartisan cooperation. Lawmakers from both parties show up for pre-dawn practices, sometimes texting their stats to reporters before 7 a.m. Republican Senator Eric Schmitt, a mega Cardinals fan, holds the highest on-base plus slugging percentage in Congressional baseball history.

Fox Sports treats the event with surprising seriousness, sending the same production crew that handles playoff games and the World Series. Producer Aaron Stojkov and his team work Cubs games one weekend, then head to Capitol Hill the next, giving the charity game big-league production value.

The Republicans have won five straight years, but the real victory happens off the field. More than three million dollars raised means real support for DC-area nonprofits, all while 32,000 fans get to see their elected officials as regular people who sometimes wear the same jersey number and practice baseball before sunrise.

Why This Inspires

In a city often divided along party lines, watching Democrats and Republicans compete in America's pastime reminds us what cooperation can accomplish. The confusion over jersey numbers becomes part of the charm, a reminder that some traditions matter more than perfection.