Yanks Mag: Like Stars and Stripes

As far as birthdays go, this is a big one. Today marks 250 years of America’s independence, and you can bet your bald eagle that the celebration will be epic. The semiquincentennial will be a national display of pride and tradition, a historic mile marker long on pomp and circumstance, and a time to reflect on all that this prosperous young nation has accomplished in just a quarter millennium. From small-town parades across the heartland to the massive procession down Constitution Avenue in Washington, folks in every state in the Union will wave Old Glory and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The evocation of “the bombs bursting in air” will be reflected in the fireworks lighting up the night sky from sea to shining sea. In Williamsburg, Va., “Thomas Jefferson” will read the Declaration of Independence aloud. Children, their tongues stained the color of red-white-and-blue ice pops, will hold sparklers aloft. And there will be hot dogs. Lots of hot dogs.

In New York City, after the ball drops in Times Square for the first time ever on a day other than New Year’s Eve, there will be another distinctly American tradition: baseball. In Ken Burns’ documentary on the subject, it was the writer, professor and cultural critic Gerald Early who said, “There are only three things that America will be remembered for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball. These are the three most beautiful things this culture has ever created.” And in the Bronx this Fourth of July, the Yankees will host a Saturday afternoon tilt at Yankee Stadium, where three things happen every game: the crowd is asked to stand and remove their caps for the national anthem, the Yankees publicly thank a Veteran of the Game for their sacrifice and service to our nation and the seventh-inning stretch begins with the singing of “God Bless America.”

These rituals are not some public relations effort or show of false patriotism. Baseball remains the national pastime, an essential thread in the tapestry of America. And as every fan, player, coach, owner and organization knows, the privilege of enjoying peanuts and Cracker Jack in peace at a ballpark was hard won. Freedom is far from free, and for as long as players have been getting paid to play a kids’ game, baseball has shown its gratitude to the men and women who have provided and protected that liberty.

“I think that’s the thing that people need to take a step back and realize -- that so many people sacrificed their lives,” said former Yankees third baseman Wade Boggs, whose parents, brother and nephew all served in the military and who was set to join the Army himself before being drafted by the Red Sox out of high school. “Some gave all. All gave some, but some paid the ultimate price, and we should be thankful each and every day for these people who not only go out and serve in the military but serve in law enforcement and keep us safe.

“If it wasn’t for them, the world would be a different place.”

Boggs was among several Hall of Famers, former big leaguers and other baseball luminaries in Cooperstown, N.Y., this past Memorial Day weekend for the Hall of Fame Military Classic. The game was a washout, called after one soggy, shivering inning. Yet for the participants proudly wearing uniforms featuring the branches of the armed forces across their chests, the veterans and other fans who had traveled many miles to watch them play, and anyone else who makes the pilgrimage to Cooperstown this summer, there is no question that a shrine to baseball is a fitting venue in which to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.

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David Robertson admitted that it felt weird being able to attend an event during baseball season, but at 41 years old, he finally found himself with some free time when there wasn’t snow on the ground. After a 17-year big league career -- including nine seasons in pinstripes -- Robertson officially hung up his spikes in January. So, when Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch invited him to participate in the Military Classic at historic Doubleday Field, he and his family eagerly booked the trip.

The right-handed reliever, who earned the nickname “Houdini” during the Yankees’ 2009 championship run for his ability to escape seemingly impossible jams, had never been to Cooperstown and had the same reaction that many first-time visitors have upon arriving in the quaint village. “It’s like the cutest town I’ve ever seen,” Robertson said. “I don’t know if that’s appropriate to say, but it is.”

Suiting up for the Classic was a no-brainer for the Alabama native, who chose to represent the Navy to honor his grandfathers. Throughout his long career, Robertson paid tribute to the military whenever possible, from visiting Walter Reed National Military Medical Center with the Yankees to supporting the Wounded Warriors Foundation to helping veterans find housing through his own foundation, High Socks for Hope. He recalls listening with rapt attention to the Navy SEALs that manager Joe Girardi would invite to speak to the team during spring training, and he’ll never forget the exhibition game that the Yankees played against the Army baseball team at West Point.

“We strolled over and hung out in their dugout, and we got to go take a tour of everything and meet all the cadets that were there,” Robertson recalled. “Seeing how strict everything was, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m basically your age, I could be here in this school right now, and I am not adult enough to be in this [situation] that you’re in.’”

That game in 2013 was also held at a field named for Abner Doubleday, who did not invent baseball but was, in fact, an American hero. After attending high school in Cooperstown, he graduated from West Point in 1842. He spent the next two decades rising through the Army ranks, and on April 12, 1861, at Fort Sumter, Doubleday -- a “vocal opponent of slavery,” according to his biography on the National Park Service website -- “commanded and aimed the first U.S. shot at the Confederates.”

While that pivotal battle in United States history was being waged, baseball was steadily burrowing into the country’s conscience. “America’s poet,” Walt Whitman, referenced the game in the 1855 version of his epic, “Leaves of Grass,” and later wrote that baseball “has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere -- belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our Constitution’s laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”

Around that same time, one of the first organized teams, the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York, endeavored to draft a formal set of rules for the game. And while baseball has evolved constantly over the ensuing 17 decades, some of the tenets set forth when Abraham Lincoln was still considering his run for president remain virtually unchanged: The 2026 MLB rulebook states that bats must be one round piece of wood not more than 2.61 inches in diameter -- nearly mirroring the circa 1857 decree that “The bat must be round and not exceed two and one half inches in diameter in the thickest part [and] must be made of wood.”

A display containing some of those documents -- which Robertson spent several minutes examining as he listened to senior curator Tom Shieber explain their significance -- was unveiled in Cooperstown over Memorial Day weekend, one of 10 stops along an “America 250 Discovery Tour” that encourages visitors -- particularly children -- to explore “how the ideals in the Declaration of Independence are reflected through the lens of baseball,” said Jane Forbes Clark, the chairman of the board of directors of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

“Baseball is obviously America’s pastime,” said Ian Kennedy, another 41-year-old ex-Yankees pitcher who recently retired after a 17-year big league career and participated in the Military Classic. “All baseball players, we love our country, we love our military, and whenever it’s time to honor them, we stop the game and acknowledge them. It’s not just something where we go through the motions. We appreciate them very much.”

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Shane Spencer knows how fortunate he was to come along when he did. A 28th-round pick of the Yankees in 1990, he was selected six rounds after Andy Pettitte and four rounds after Jorge Posada. Spencer rose through the Minors playing alongside future Hall of Famers Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter. Called up in 1998, his scorching September helped power the Yankees into the postseason, and he kept right on raking in October, homering in each of his first two playoff appearances. After three seasons in the bigs, he had earned three World Series rings, and in Game 4 of the 2001 World Series, before Tino Martinez’s ninth-inning heroics and Jeter’s star turn as Mr. November, it was Spencer who drove in the Yankees’ only run with a third-inning homer off Curt Schilling.

But when Spencer, 54, speaks to Minor Leaguers or at youth baseball clinics, the advice he dispenses often stems as much from being the son of a naval officer as from being part of a Yankees dynasty. He knows the sacrifices military families must make when a parent spends 20 years in the Navy, as his father did before working 23 years in U.S. Customs.

“My dad was gone,” Spencer said during a reception in the Hall of Fame’s plaque gallery the night before he rapped an RBI single off Charlie Morton for Team Stars’ lone run in the abbreviated Military Classic. “He’d be away for six months, and I’d never see him. We didn’t have cell phones back then, so you might only talk once a month.” Spencer sees similarities in the toll that baseball takes on players forced to be “gone a lot and missing time with their kids and family wherever their hometown base is.

“This is the life we chose, and we’re very fortunate,” he said, “but it’s very tough on a family.”

Those sacrifices were twofold for baseball’s military men, and a tangible reminder greets visitors to the plaque gallery. Seventy Hall of Famers have a medallion below their plaque denoting the branch of the armed forces in which they served. One can’t help but wonder how baseball history might look had Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Bob Feller and dozens of other legends not given up part of their primes during World War II. The record books would surely be different, and it’s nearly impossible to imagine the St. Louis Browns still winning the 1944 American League pennant.

Only one current big leaguer -- Tampa Bay reliever Griffin Jax, a captain in the Air Force Reserve -- has also been active military. That wasn’t always the case. And while just a few World War II-era ballplayers are still around to describe how things were back then, the big leaguers who served the United States during the Vietnam War have vivid memories of their often-painful experiences.

Al Bumbry spent 14 years in the Majors, 13 of them patrolling the outfield for the Baltimore Orioles in the 1970s and early ’80s. Thinking back on his clashes with Yankees catcher Thurman Munson -- an Army reservist in the late ’60s -- Bumbry laughs at how he always knew when Munson would call for a pitchout. “One day, I was going up to the plate, and he finally said, ‘You son of a [gun], how come you never run when I call a pitchout!?’ I looked at him like, ‘I’ve got something, but I’m not going to … tell you what I got!’” Happy memories like those came after a year of warfare in Vietnam that altered Bumbry’s outlook significantly.

“In baseball, you’re not fighting for your life,” the Bronze Star recipient said while sitting in the first-base dugout at Doubleday Field on May 23. “When you’re faced with the possibility of death from one day to the next, you learn to do things. I had men in my platoons whose lives I had to look out after, including my own. You had to do all the things right.

“You’re there to do a job, but if you don’t do your job, people might not come back.”

For those lucky enough to return alive, the reception was often horrifying. Many Americans had spent years exercising their First Amendment right to free speech by vehemently voicing their opposition to the war in Vietnam, and tensions ran high. In 1970, Munson was one month into his American League Rookie of the Year campaign when four unarmed student protesters at his alma mater, Kent State University, were killed by the Ohio National Guard. As the bicentennial approached in 1976, returning soldiers, many of whom suffered PTSD, were treated as anything but heroes.

“You would say the word ‘Vietnam,’ and people would run and hide,” Bumbry said.

That’s why, more than a half century later, Vietnam veterans such as Los Angeles native Jay Burbank appreciate when a young person says, “Thank you for your service” but would prefer to hear, “Welcome home.” It’s why Gary Bjorkquist, an Army combat engineer in Vietnam, spent the next few decades assisting fellow veterans through various outreach programs. And it’s why both men, along with so many other vets, were inclined to visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum this year when they heard about one particular piece being displayed publicly for the first time.

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Cubs outfielder Rick Monday was patrolling center field at Dodger Stadium on the afternoon of April 25, 1976, when a 37-year-old Missouri man and his 11-year-old son bolted onto the field. The man was carrying something underneath his arm, and when Monday -- five years removed from a six-year stint with the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve -- realized that it was an American flag, instinct took over. As the man laid the Stars and Stripes on the grass in left-center field and began soaking it with lighter fluid, Monday raced in and scooped the flag up before it could be set on fire.

One didn’t need to be a Cubs fan to appreciate what he had done. As security hauled the trespassers away, a message appeared on the Dodger Stadium scoreboard: “Rick Monday -- you made a great play.” Word quickly spread, and the incident became national news.

“What I stood up for that day was the flag and the people that have supported that flag,” Monday said during an hourlong talk inside the Hall of Fame’s Grandstand Theater on May 22. “And some have paid the ultimate price to protect the rights and freedoms that we have.”

Monday was the first overall pick in the first MLB Draft in 1965, a two-time All-Star during a 19-year big league career, a 1981 NLCS hero and World Series champion, and a beloved Dodgers broadcaster for the last several decades. Yet he’s perfectly fine with being best remembered for one moment 50 years ago that had little to do with baseball.

“Not only as a citizen of this country but as a Marine, I would rather be known for that than to be known for just standing there and watching them do it,” he said. “I hope that people understand, regardless of age and what they were exposed to, what a big deal it is to contribute to where we’re all going as a country.”

Monday’s words struck a nerve with everyone in attendance, particularly the veterans.

“I was just so proud of what he did,” said Bjorkquist, a lifelong Yankees fan who drives a pinstriped Ford Mustang convertible with “AJ 99” vanity plates around his Delta County neighborhood on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “You can protest any other way you want. There’s no reason to burn the flag.”

As visitors to the Hall of Fame can see while it is on display through Labor Day, the flag that Monday saved has endured. It might be a bit worn and frayed around the edges, but it remains intact, a symbol of American pride and perseverance. It says something that a protester traveled nearly 2,000 miles to attempt to desecrate it at a famous baseball stadium -- and that he was thwarted by a Marine’s act of patriotism. From Dodger Stadium to Yankee Stadium to ballparks big and small across this great land, baseball games will now and forever serve as a place to enjoy the freedom that we, as Americans, all share, and a proper place to pay tribute to the brave men and women who fought -- and continue to fight -- for it.

“You realize that you’ve pretty much got it all, and they gave up all of it for you to have that,” Robertson said. “They’re the real heroes in the world.”

Nathan Maciborski is the executive editor of Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the July 2026 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.