thurdl sports

British baseball update

For those just tuning in, who didn't follow over from my sports posts that I used to have be part of my Live Journal, a little background. I have, for awhile, been surprised that baseball has never gotten much of a foothold in the United Kingdom. I always somewhat figured that any nation that could so thoroughly embrace cricket could get behind baseball. I even know a few residents of the UK who are very curious about baseball, try to catch what games they can, and even have become closeted Red Sox fans, which I try not to hold against them. I mean, they've got to start somewhere, right?

So I saw some news that interested me.

ESPN.com has announced that The Oval, a cricket site in London, is one of several candidate sites for European MLB games in 2007. The idea, as stated, is similar to the movement of some regular season (usually season opening) games to sites in Mexico and Japan. Rome and Amsterdam seem to be some of the more likely sites, since the nations of Italy and the Netherlands are both going to be taking part of the World Baseball Classic (though the Netherlander team will probably be more of a Curacao team), however it would be interesting to see the movement of games expanded from one series to multiple teams. Now, I'm not going to say send all 30 teams over to England to start their seasons there, but perhaps a dozen teams in 6 sites, or even half of that, would be an interesting outreaching to a continent where baseball hasn't really taken off.

I hope to see this happen. And I hope that it ends up being the Nationals who get to make the trip to the Oval.

posted by thurdl @ 4:14 PM