After Opening Night on Netflix on Wednesday, the rest of Major League Baseball celebrated one of the great traditions in sports on Thursday with Opening Day. However, the festivities got off to an unfortunate start in New York as singer Christopher Jackson forgot the words to the national anthem before the New York Mets hosted the Pittsburgh Pirates.
And to make it worse, the game and the anthem aired on NBC to a national television audience.
If only there were Spring Training for the national anthem singers to get back into form for the new season to begin just like there is for the players.
— welovesports40 (@welovesports40) March 26, 2026
Instead of saying, “O’er the ramparts we watched,” Jackson repeated the line “What so proudly we hailed” before “were so gallantly streaming?” Thankfully, he was able to take it home from there without another hiccup, but not before the mistake went viral across social media.
Christopher Jackson is a Tony Award nominated-artist. He’s also appeared in multiple films and television shows. He even won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Song for A Children’s Series for his work on Sesame Street.
But to make the national anthem snafu even more ironic, he earned that nomination from his portrayal of George Washington in Hamilton. If you can sing the famously complex lyrics in Hamilton, you can definitely do anything as a performer. This kind of thing can happen to anyone, it’s just very unfortunate it happened on MLB Opening Day in front of a nationwide audience.
We’ve seen some pretty cringeworthy national anthem performances before at major sporting events. Thankfully, from a quality perspective, this was not like the historic effort of Carl Lewis. At least Jackson sounded really good!
However, the Mets and their fans are probably not going to take this as a great omen for their chances in 2026. If the Mets aren’t able to contend once again this season, we might be able to trace it back all the way to the national anthem before the first game of the season to understand why.
On the other hand, they did score 5 runs on Paul Skenes in the first inning, so maybe this is just what they needed to spark them to success.
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