Admittedly, I’m not as big of a soccer fan as I probably should be. This is not a comment on how Americans as a whole should follow the world’s most popular sport more closely, but rather to say that I have a lot of friends who follow the sport and I wish I had a more vested interest in it. Soccer is a deeply complicated game, besides the business or transactional sides of it, with layers upon layers of strategy and storylines, that it makes me feel like I’m missing out on all the hidden fun when, say, the World Cup comes around, and a bunch of people who I talk to quite often start speaking in an alien tongue about an esoteric, yet culturally significant extravaganza that I can’t fully grasp. But it’s the very existence of the event that arouses excitement, the “recreational tribalism” that breeds anticipation and makes the World Cup and other global soccer events a fun watch. There is no novelty when it comes to that type of tournament. The spectacle of the tournament is the novelty itself, even for someone like me who has a limited knowledge of what’s truly going on.
Major League Baseball, meanwhile, is hosting its second London Series this weekend, which will feature a two-game set between the Cardinals and Cubs in London Stadium, the traditional home of the Premier League soccer franchise, West Ham United. London Stadium has its roots as a track-and-field site, meaning that when it was constructed, low air friction was ergonomically kept in mind for running competitions. Baseball fans are quite used to the idea of low air friction from games in Coors Field in Denver, where its high elevation has led to Coors having the highest home run rate among all Major League parks since it opened in 1995. So it should’ve been no surprise to anyone to see the home run barrage at the 2019 London Series between the Yankees and Red Sox, which featured 50 combined runs scored including ten home runs over just two games at, yes, London Stadium.
The reason why I bring this up is because Major League Baseball has been going above and beyond in recent years to change baseball’s perception of being a boring sport by artificially inflating its excitement levels. In some ways, their decision-making has been genuine and has worked, like in the case of this year’s sweeping rule changes that I, and a majority of baseball fans, enjoy. Where I draw the line, however, is changing the sport fundamentally into something that it’s not. The 2019 London Series was an anomaly in terms of run-scoring, but I don’t think it was coincidental in terms of the location of the series. There are plenty of non-track-and-field venues to hold a baseball game in the United Kingdom, such as any other Premier League stadium where the air resistance is somewhat normal, yet for the 2023 London Series, we’re back in London Stadium. I understand that baseball has monetary motivations to consider when it comes to an international event like this, but when Englanders turn on a baseball game stateside and don’t see both teams in the double-digits every night, it won’t create the lasting European popularity that MLB is hoping for.
I’m excited to watch this year’s London Series because it’s baseball in London. That’s pretty cool! I don’t need 700 home runs over the span of one weekend to stay glued to my television, nor should anyone else watching Saturday and Sunday’s games. Baseball is a game steeped in tradition and magnitude; that should be the marketing ploy that MLB uses to get the word of these games out. After that, all you need is nine hitters on each side. But because we’re back in homer-happy London Stadium, stay locked onto Baseball Savant this weekend because you’re going to see some wild Statcast numbers.
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