I wrote about the issue last year, and I still think what I said then is sound as a nut, with one change I'll mention in due course:
Today baseball still has no official policy regarding "The Star Spangled Banner," which may have been the wisest course even if the song's playing before games remains a tradition. (Only one known major league baseball player, Oakland catcher Bruce Maxwell, has ever taken a knee as an anthem protest.) And perhaps professional sports might step back, think twice, and ponder whether it's time to modify the national anthems tradition.
Mandatory patriotism is antithetical to the sound idea that loving your country springs properly from your heart alone. John Hirschauer of The Daily Wire kind of isolated the point . . . when he wrote, "By choosing to make standing for the anthem a matter of coercion rather than a voluntary act of patriotism, it (quite wrongly) suggests that NFL executives and the kneeling movement's many malcontents in the country are unable to provide a coherent reason why America is worth honouring in spite of its flaws."
There's an argument that playing national anthems before every last game or race ("O Canada" features, too, at competitions involving Canadian teams) actually dilutes the anthems' meaning. American military services begin and end each official duty day with a flag raising ceremony and a playing of "The Star Spangled Banner." Professional sports, many fans' rhetoric notwithstanding, aren't exactly businesses that become matters of life and death, if you don't count the occasional NASCAR race crash. A foreign adversary wishing to start a war with the United States won't do it because they think the Astros are imperialist dogs . . .
. . . We might suggest American (and Canadian, for that matter) professional sports leagues can it with national anthems before every last game or race but save it for games played on significant national holidays. Would it be terribly un-American if "The Star Spangled Banner" was saved for opening baseball games played on Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labour Day, to name the three major such holidays occurring during baseball season? Before football, basketball, and hockey games played on Veteran's Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Presidents' Day? Before NASCAR races run on most of those holidays? (For that matter, would Canada consider it terribly unpatriotic if its home sports teams limited "O Canada" to their home games played on Canada's national or provincial holidays?)
Restoring real meaning at the same time you honour the sound precept that real patriotism is not induced at gunpoint, metaphoric or otherwise, in the centennial of Fred Thomas's spontaneous salute and its spontaneous inspiration, would be wisdom for a country founded by uncommonly wise men, one of whom ended the nation's first presidency in part with a warning against "the postures of pretended patriotism." Wisely.
Background: Fred Thomas was a Red Sox infielder on furlough from the Navy to play in the 1918 World Series, which began in Comiskey Park to accommodate the champion Cubs---it was feared Wrigley Field was too small to accommodate expected Series crowds. The game itself was kind of a snooze, Babe Ruth threw a shutout and the only run of the game scored in the fourth. But during the seventh-inning stretch, the Navy band present at the ballpark began to play; in those years it was common for military bands to provide music at sports events.
They played "The Star Spangled Banner" quite without any scripting; no one told them to do it. As they began, Thomas spontaneously turned toward the flag flying behind the fence and saluted. Just as spontaneously, other players did likewise, prompting fans in the stands to do it. And that was
years before "The Star Spangled Banner" became America's official national anthem. (That happened in 1931.)
But with World War I still a month from ending Thomas's spontaneous gesture made perfect sense and was entirely understandable. And, nobody
told him to do it, either. It came from his heart, the place from whence real patriotism ought to spring, and not by law or government blather, the places from whence real patriotism ought not to spring.
Though if I were to write today what I cited above, I'd throw in playing "The Star Spangled Banner" on Opening Day and before Game One of the World Series' before the Super Bowl; before Game One of both the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Final; before day one of the Masters' tournament; you get the idea.
(P.S. The aforementioned Oakland catcher, Bruce Maxwell, became a free agent after the 2018 season. He has yet to find a new major league job despite changing agents, and I'm convinced by all available evidence that it has nothing to do with his taking a knee during a 2017 game---during which he actually still saluted during "The Star Spangled Banner"---and everything to do with a) his below-replacement level skills and b) an incident in which he waved a gun at a food delivery worker.)
