Ben S. Bernanke now has his own baseball card.
The Federal Reserve distributed the card at a staff reception this week in honor of its outgoing chairman, a banker who also happens to be a passionate baseball fan. Mr. Bernanke stepped down on Friday after eight years at the helm.
Mr. Bernanke has a cabinet full of baseball memorabilia in his office at the Fed, and he has season tickets near the first-base line at Nationals Park. He once rooted for the Boston Red Sox, but transferred his loyalties when the Nationals came to Washington.
In 2012, he described himself in The Wall Street Journal as an “unabashed” Nationals fan, adding, “and I’ve been one since the team arrived in town in 2005.”
The card, a fine piece of Photoshop work, shows a bareheaded Bernanke — athletes take no honorifics in these pages — in Nationals gear.
The back describes him as “first drafted from the Ivy League” in 2002, when he joined the Fed’s Board of Governors. During those early years, with his family still in New Jersey, the card says he lived on “a steady diet of Hot Pockets.”
The listed stats include 226 speeches and 79 congressional appearances.
