Former MLB All-Star Rick Monday is in Cooperstown, New York, this Memorial Day weekend with the American flag he rescued 50 years ago.
On the third floor of exhibits at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum sits a faded, slightly torn flag encased in a glass box for visitors to study. Loaned by Monday through Labor Day weekend, this particular patriotic cloth has a unique story that dwarfs many of the game-used collectibles housed in baseball’s depository for safekeeping. Coming to light during the United States’s Bicentennial, when Monday was the Chicago Cubs’ starting center fielder, having the flag, for the first time, to be available for public viewing during America’s Semiquincentennial seems only appropriate.
