Monday's Greatest Game

A save for the ages

I don’t have many bobbleheads but I wish I had this one, which commemorates an event from 49 years ago today. I wrote about it in some detail on my now-defunct blog many years ago, but to make a long story short, it goes like this:

Back in 1976, America was in a precarious place. As I was a young kid at the time, I didn’t understand how badly the Vietnam War had divided the country. In fact, I was not even aware it had taken place. By the end of the war in 1975, it was seen as a loss in terms of failing to prevent the fall of Vietnam to the Communists, and the loss of many thousands of young men’s lives in the process. But at least there was a bicentennial celebration coming up!

There were red, white and blue patches on the jerseys of the teams in the Super Bowl that year, and there were bicentennial quarters in circulation. Those were the types of things the eight-year old kid I was at the time could understand. The circumstances of math meant that I was going to experience something that not everyone would get to see, and so there was patriotism in the air in early 1976.

There was also a day game in Dodger Stadium on April 25, and the Cubs were in town. I had only just started following baseball the year before, and the Cubs were my newly-adopted team. Both teams had just 14 games under their belts on the season, and I am quite certain that the patterns and rhythms of a long baseball season were entirely foreign to me. I was able to watch the Cubs on WGN-TV pretty regularly, but even then I probably wasn’t aware of it yet. All of this is to say I wasn’t watching the game live on TV as the events unfolded.

In the bottom of the fourth inning that day, Rick Monday was playing in centerfield when the Dodgers came up to bat, trailing 1-0. The Cubs’ starter that day, Steve Stone, had already left the game for some reason, and a pitcher named Ken Crosby had taken his place. Ken Crosby pitched just 20 1/3 innings over his short major league career, but he was on the mound when a 37 year-old man and his 11 year-old son ran onto the field that day and doused an American flag with lighter fluid.

As a Marine Corps reservist, Monday was not willing to watch as the flag-burning protest unfolded. He broke into a sprint and—after the wind blew the first lit match out—was able to reach down and snatch the flag away before the two were able to successfully ignite it. Monday handed the flag to a Dodger pitcher, and the crowd of 25,000 in attendance applauded what had just taken place. Whether the incident inspired the Dodger bats to come alive and put four runs on the board that inning is impossible to know, but Ken Crosby’s day was over once that half inning was completed. The game went into extra innings, and the Dodgers came away with a 5-4 win.

For some reason, the manager of the National League All-Star team that summer (and the game was played in Philadelphia, of course) passed over Rick Monday as the Cubs’ representative for the team. Not only did Monday have the best statistical season of his entire career that summer (he never hit 32 home runs or drove in 77 runs in any of his other 18 seasons in the majors), but he saved the freaking flag, for crying out loud!

A week after the American Bicentennial celebration, Rick Monday coming up to bat at the All-Star game in Philadelphia would have been the stuff of a Norman Rockwell painting. But no, Sparky Anderson somehow chose Steve Swisher from the Cubs, instead. Steve Swisher, who batted .236 that season and never got a whiff of All-Star competition, either in 1976 or any other season he played in the major leagues. He played in 509 more games in the majors than I ever would, but that isn’t my point.

Rick Monday’s heroics on this date nearly a half-century ago created an image that the game, and the country itself, needed to have at that point. It hasn’t been forgotten, and I’m more than glad to recount it here today. While there’s much going on right now that’s driving me crazy, I’d rather look backward and focus on something positive, instead. It’s a good day to give Rick Monday some flowers, isn’t it?