U.S. House Republican Tim Walberg’s office reports that he doesn’t play on the congressional baseball team and wasn’t at the practice when the shootings occurred this morning. His predecessor did play in the game for two years.
Mark Schauer played center field for the Democrats in the annual congressional charity baseball game in 2009 and 2010, practicing several mornings a week. He says the game gave him a chance to build relationships with senior party leaders and Republicans, too.
He describes the news of the shootings as “unimaginable and unbelievable.”
Schauer says that in the second of his two years on the team, he began to see capital police at the 7 a-m practices. He thinks this incident could have been a lot worse were it not for the presence of security.