Sorry for not getting you several random words about sports last week. Moving forward, this column will be a bit more irregular. There may be weeks with several of these columns or more weeks without any, depending on what’s going on. Since one of New England’s professional sports teams is playing a game on another continent right now, it seems like today is a good day to restart things with a few facts about the Red Sox/Yankees London Series as well as some about other tangentially related things.
First Time in London, But MLB Has Done This Before
So, Saturday and Sunday’s games will be the first Major League Baseball regular season games in London, but they’re not the first regular season games played in a country other than the U.S., Canada or Puerto Rico (which is a Commonwealth of the U.S., but still included on MLB’s International Series website.)
The first-ever regular season games outside of the U.S. and Canada took place in 1996 in Monterrey, Mexico between the New York Mets and San Diego Padres with the personification of 1980s Mexican baseball getting the win.
New York went overseas again in March 2000 for a game against the Cubs in the Tokyo Dome. The Mets won in the 11th off a pinch-hit grand slam by Benny Agbanyani, who would return to Japan for seven years with Bobby Valentine’s Chiba Lotte Marines to finish off an admirable career.
The Yankees (2004) and Red Sox (2008) returned to Tokyo Dome allowing MLB to show off Japanese imports Hideki Matsui and Daisuke Matsuzaka respectively, and the Mariners played the A’s at Tokyo Dome to provide Japanese legend Ichiro Suzuki a chance to return to his homeland for the first time since heading to Seattle. Ichiro retired after one last game there this March.
Mexico also played host to more games. In April 1999, Colorado defeated San Diego in Monterrey by a score of 8-2, thanks in large part to four hits from Mexican native Vinny Castilla. The Padres returned to Monterrey again in 2018 for a series with the Dodgers and Monterrey hosted the Reds and Cardinals as well as the Astros and Agnels earlier this year.
In 2014, MLB played its first southern hemisphere games with a two-game series between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
Although Australia’s baseball roots weren’t quite as deep as those in Japan or Mexico, professional baseball leagues, particularly those competing for an award known as the Claxton Shield, had existed in Australia for decades prior to the 2014 game.
A Few Weird Things
One of the quirks of the London series is that like the games in Australia (and unlike the Mexican and Japanese games), London Stadium is not built for baseball, having originally been built for the Olympics in 2012 and now used primarily for West Ham of the English Premier League.
And also like Australia, the unique confines include gigantic amounts of foul territory, 4,000 sq. ft more than any permanent major league stadium, and right-field and left-field foul lines just 330 feet away and a center-field wall just 385 feet away, shorter than any current major league stadium.
And although these are technically “home” games for the Red Sox, the Yankees will also wear home pinstripes.
Baseball in England
Generally, the primary bat-and-ball game in any country is determined whether that country is a member of the British Commonwealth, with Commonwealth countries preferring cricket and non-Commonwealth countries preferring baseball, with Canada being the exception.
However, modern baseball has a long history in England and with English contributors, stemming back to Baseball Hall of Fame member and New York Times writer Henry Chadwick.
Rounders, one of baseball’s ancestors, was played in England for centuries prior to the first modern English baseball games in the 1880s.
Watching/Listening to This Weekend’s Games
First pitch for Saturday’s game is 1 p.m. on Fox (Comcast ch. 13 in Manchester) and Sunday’s game is set for 10:10 a.m. on ESPN (Comcast ch. 49 in Manchester).
Due to the travel involved, the Red Sox won’t play again on Wednesday after Sunday’s game and didn’t play on Thursday or Friday, the only time this season that the Red Sox will not play on a Friday.