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MLB showcasing Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees in London a good idea?

ByDamian Dydyn|
(Left to right) Chief of Business Affairs for the MLBPA Tim Slavin, Boston Red Sox joint owner John W Henry, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, New York Yankees joint owners Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal and Hal Steinbrenner during the press conference at Regent Street Cinema, London. (Photo by Kirsty O'Connor/PA Images via Getty Images)
(Left to right) Chief of Business Affairs for the MLBPA Tim Slavin, Boston Red Sox joint owner John W Henry, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, New York Yankees joint owners Jennifer Steinbrenner Swindal and Hal Steinbrenner during the press conference at Regent Street Cinema, London. (Photo by Kirsty O'Connor/PA Images via Getty Images)

The Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees will play a two-game series to showcase the MLB in London in June 2019. It will be a logistical nightmare.

MLB announced today that the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees will play a series in London. The series will take place June 29 and 30 of 2019. This will be followed by a second series in 2020. The teams for that haven’t been announced yet.

While having a series across the pond is historic in that it will be the first in Europe, there have been games played in Japan, Puerto Rico, Australia, and Mexico. So having the MLB in London as a next step makes sense, right?

To start, let’s acknowledge that as a marketing ploy, it’s a pretty good one. Take a look at the ad that MLB tweeted out as part of the announcement:

That’s a compelling video. It makes me want to see the Boston Red Sox vs. New York Yankees series, yet  I’m a skeptic of this particular idea. Major League Baseball has put a lot of effort into branding itself as an international game, and those efforts have indeed borne fruit.

The game has drawn Latin American athletes for decades and Asian players for the last few. We have also seen players from various countries in Europe and the land down under. To that end, having games hosted in various countries does make sense. But let’s call it what it is a publicity stunt.

It’s Logistical Nightmare.

Baseball has had a difficult time squeezing all 162 games into the roughly six months of the year in which games are played. We began the 2018 season in late March and had a number of games postponed because of cold rain and snowy conditions. And the season already drags into November by the time the World Series is wrapped up.

That means the most important games of the year are played in the cold. And cold weather baseball can be excruciating for players and fans to endure. It’s not ideal, but there is too much money on the table for the owners to seriously consider shortening the season.

Squeezing intercontinental travel into that logistical mess may be necessary from time to time, but it’s certainly not good for the teams making the flight. In 2008, when the Red Sox opened the season in Japan against the Oakland Athletics, the league scheduled that two-game series for March 25th, giving them plenty of time to get back home for the normal opening of the season. Each team also finished their spring training by playing local teams in exhibitions leading up to the official first game.

These intercontinental series have always been kept to two games because of the difficulties inherent in fitting this kind of travel into an already tightly packed regular season schedule. And before the 2019 London series, only Japan and Australia will have hosted MLB games outside of the Americas. The novelty of it is fun, but there simply isn’t any way this can become a regular occurrence.

The league isn’t expanding across an ocean.

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There is absolutely no chance of ever having an MLB team outside of the United States, Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean. Even getting into South America creates too much travel time to fit at least a trip a year (more for division rivals) into the schedule.

Perhaps if the league did away with division heavy scheduling, it would be possible. But it would likely also require cutting back from 162 games as well.

It’s entirely feasible to start expanding into Mexico and to bring a team back to Montreal. The series in Puerto Rico wasn’t the first of its kind, nor should it be the last. Taking a series to the Dominican Republic and maybe even Cuba would be great for the sport as well.

These are manageable flights that don’t disrupt travel too much. Outreach to these countries can only help with the continued development of talent in Central and South America.

And that’s the argument for having one of these intercontinental series every few years. It’s a hassle. But insofar as it helps to keep baseball in the public consciousness in those countries, it does pay off in the end. Again, we’re talking about a publicity stunt here. But that’s fine.

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I’ll certainly be tuning in, and I imagine most of you will be too. If nothing else, the local announcers (please let there be local announcers) should be fun to listen to! What are your thoughts on this series or intercontinental series in general?

The Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees are the perfect duo to kick this off!

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