Riverdale singer marks America’s 250th anniversary by performing the national anthem at baseball games

As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, Riverdale resident Eytan Saenger is marking the milestone one baseball game at a time.

The 22-year-old recent Binghamton University graduate is spending the summer traveling to ballparks across the Northeast to sing the national anthem before the first inning begins.

The idea took shape in April, shortly before graduation, after Saenger performed the anthem for the Binghamton Rumble Ponies. As the nation’s semiquincentennial approached, he began looking into the history behind one of baseball’s most enduring traditions.

“It ties into immediately after World War One at one of the World Series games where veterans who had just come back from the war were at the game, and they decided to play the anthem, and everyone stood up in celebration,” he said. “And then it was really from there on that the tradition began and got started.”

For Saenger, who was born in Boston and moved to Riverdale at 10 years old, the discovery reinforced the significance of the anthem as more than a pregame ritual. In it, he saw the opportunity to combine what he calls his three greatest passions: music, baseball and civic engagement.

“I realized it happened to be the approaching of the 250 birthday celebrations that were going to be happening throughout the country,” he said. “For me it felt like a really meaningful opportunity to combine these three things in a way which felt very appropriate.”

A graduate of Salanter Akiba Riverdale High School, Saenger has long been involved in civic life. While still a student, he founded a club that organized a City Council town hall and an interfaith mayoral forum for Jewish, Catholic and Muslim students, hoping to encourage civic participation among his peers. At Binghamton University, where he studied political science, he remained active in student leadership while continuing to sing with Jewish a cappella groups.

His anthem tour has since taken him to the Brooklyn Cyclones, Staten Island FerryHawks and Sussex County Miners. Additional performances are planned this summer with the Akron RubberDucks, Hudson Valley Renegades, Wilmington Blue Rocks and New York Boulders.

Saenger has also partnered with Civic Spirit, a nonprofit that promotes civic education. At games, he distributes materials promoting the organization, including T-shirts, sunglasses and even pocket Constitutions.

He believes baseball offers one of the few venues where Americans from different backgrounds still regularly come together.

“Between the major leagues, minor leagues, independent leagues, collegiate baseball, there are hundreds of thousands of games that happen over the course of summer,” he said. “Each one starts the same way, with people standing up for three minutes before the first pitch to sing the anthem collectively, no matter which part of the country, no matter what political affiliation, ethnicity, background people are coming from. There’s a really unifying nature to this tradition of singing the anthem.”

That feeling, he said, extends beyond the ballpark.

“I think including Civic Spirit is so important because it shows us that there’s something deeper that binds us,” Saenger said. “It shows us that there’s something that we all have in common, the values that we share and a responsibility that we hold to each other.”

As the country enters its milestone year, Saenger hopes people see the anthem as more than just the opening act before a baseball game.

“If you can stand together with people to sing the anthem together, to recognize and uphold that tradition, then I still believe that people have that ability to do so beyond that context as well,” he said. “Whether you’re wearing a Red Sox hat or Yankees hat, you’re still singing the same song together.”