There’s something fascinating about North American sports leagues taking their game to international markets. I remember being in the UK when the NFL held a regular-season contest in London. While I was not in Wembley Stadium when the Chargers took on the Saints, I watched on the BBC, which itself was very different from the American broadcasts I’m used to.
Britain’s capital has become a popular spot for staging North American sports. Last year, the Yankees and Red Sox brought their storied rivalry across the pond. This year was to be a Midwestern matchup between the Cubs and Cardinals before Major League Baseball scuttled those plans on account of the coronavirus (Pavitt, 2020).
A Google search on the MLB London Series offers several stories from US sources like USA Today, CBS Sports, NBC Sports, and ESPN. The first British source does not appear until the second page of the results, from the Evening Standard, the newspaper hawked through the streets of London at the end of the workday. The Evening Standard story, written by Flood (2020), is to-the-point regarding the cancellation of the series. It mentions the previous year’s affair along with other major events that will not run during the summer, including the Olympics and Wimbledon.
The article from CBS Sports, on the other hand, is much more in-depth about the status of the MLB season in general. Axisa (2020) reports that games in Puerto Rico and Mexico City were also axed and that those events plus London could potentially be rescheduled for one year later. Meanwhile, on the chance the season started before June 13, the Cubs and Cardinals would meet at Busch Stadium, as St. Louis had given up those home games.
Compared to soccer and cricket, baseball simply is not a priority in Great Britain. Says Katz (2019), “baseball has not developed a mass following–in part, perhaps, because it seems impenetrable to people who didn’t grow up with the sport. It appears that soccer fans find baseball too slow and cricket fans find it too fast” (para. 6). As media works to cover items of interest to as many people as possible, the British audience may not be keen to hear too many details about what happens on the baseball diamond. There is also the matter of time–most baseball games anymore are played in the evening in the US and Canada, which is the middle of the night for Britons. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t spend the overnight hours following a sport when I have to be to work at eight a.m., save for perhaps the playoffs.
Still, baseball has its share of fans in the UK and even enjoyed demand from time to time, including last year when the Yankees and Red Sox sold-out London Stadium (Katz, 2019; Flood, 2020). Hopefully, MLB will get another chance to play games there and maybe I can attend then.
References
Axisa, M. (2020, April 1). Coronavirus: MLB cancels 2020 London Series between Cardinals and Cubs scheduled in June. Retrieved from https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/coronavirus-mlb-cancels-2020-london-series-between-cardinals-and-cubs-scheduled-in-june/
Flood, G. (2020, April 1). MLB London series 2020 between Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals cancelled due to coronavirus. Evening Standard. Retrieved from https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/mlb-london-series-2020-cancelled-coronavirus-a4404306.html
Katz, G. (2019, June 28). British baseball strictly minor league despite proud history. Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/british-baseball-off-proud-history-64014484
Pavitt, M. (2020, April 2). MLB London Series cancelled amid coronavirus crisis. Retrieved from https://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1092737/mlb-london-series-cancelled-coronavirus