Bush leaving work early to watch MLB playoffs

WASHINGTON, DC — U.S. President George W. Bush announced that he’s finishing work at 3:00 pm eastern time today, in plenty of time to get over to the residence and watch 9 hours of playoff baseball without interruption.

“As you know, I love baseball,” Bush said in a statement. “So with the playoffs starting today, I thought that I’d check my schedule and see if there was any possibility that I’d watch some of the games today. Turns out that everything is pretty much under control, from what I can tell, so I thought I’d get out of here at 3 pm.”

According to sources, the White House only had to cancel a couple of events for this afternoon.

“The president has canceled a plan phone conversation with Treasury secretary Henry Paulsen,” said Dana Perino, White House spokeswoman. “He also had a scheduled meeting to discuss plans for the Iraq war for the rest of the year, but we’re going to delay that till this weekend. And that was pretty much it for today; Wednesday is ordinarily ‘nap day,’ so we keep the schedule pretty light anyway.”

The President has apparently ordered the White House pastry chef to prepare a “significant amount” of Crackerjack for this afternoon.

“President Bush loves Cole Hamels,” Perino said. “You know this. So for him, spending the afternoon on the couch with some Crackerjack and King Cole–well, that’s going to be a priority.”

It’s going to be tough for this sport to sweep any nations, but it’s still pretty frickin’ cool!