Eh, games in Monterrey, Mexico and Japan make sense to me. I’d rather see games in Latin American countries that share our love for the sport but where most people never get a chance to see the top league live.
ETA: And by all means play exhibition games in Europe or wherever else…during spring training.
from a P. G. Wodehouse story about baseball.
And from later in his life, after he’d been living in America:
MLB’s European branch office is located in London. Really, there is no European location that makes sense for baseball. It’s not popular anywhere over there. Given they already played in Japan and Mexico, I think Korea or possibly Australia would be the next most popular places outside of other Latin American countries. Never been to one, but I understand pro baseball games in Korea are quite the spectacle. Lots of organized fan cheers and so forth.
The Netherlands has a baseball tradition dating back over 100 years. Thanks mainly to their historical connection to Curacao and Aruba (residents are Dutch citizens), they’ve fielded some pretty good teams. The Netherlands were the last winners of the Baseball World Cup, in 2011, defeating Cuba. Yankees shortstop Didi Gregorious was born in Amsterdam (his father pitched for the Amsterdam Pirates.) Players from Curacao include Jonathan Schoop, Kenley Jensen, Andrelton Simmons and former outfielder Andruw Jones. Xander Bogaerts and former pitcher Sidney Ponson are from Aruba.
If you wanted to grow baseball in Europe, that would be the place to start.
Gleyber Torres has 10 home runs this season…against Baltimore. It’s completely bonkers how bad the pitching is for the Orioles. I’m not really enjoying these games, except for when they show the Baltimore announcer Gary Thorne losing his mind.
12 homers on the season and 10 against the O’s. Wow.
Yanks set a weird record, 6 straight games against at Camden Yards with 3 or more HRs.
White Sox triple play yesterday:
Sports analysts/commentators are getting increasingly (and bizarrely) enamored of the idea of “blowing up” teams if they’re not going particularly well early in the season.
There were calls for the Red Sox to purge their roster for prospects when they began 11-17, and for the Mets to do the same after getting swept by the Marlins. Neither team is a good bet to win a championship in 2019 if they even make the playoffs, but they’ve definitely shown signs of life in recent days.
I was amused to find a story on the St. Louis Blues from early January when they were at the bottom of the NHL, eagerly speculating on the haul they could get by trading away their stars - they’re now in the Stanley Cup finals.
There are of course teams that won a title by tanking and building for the future i.e. the Astros, but my impression is that long or even short-term success through such a plan is much rarer than pundits would admit.
actually ive been told baseball is popular in Russia also
You see something new at a baseball game every time #2:
Something called J.D.Martin, at age 36…is pitching for the AA Tulsa Drillers. He’s apparently trying to master the knuckleball, so his catcher…again at AA, is Josh Thole who used to catch Dickey.
Twins first team to 100 homers this season. Damn hot right now. We’ll see how long this can last.
Absolutely crazy game between the Washington Nationals and Miami Marlins that featured back to back homers by Juan Soto and Matt Adams. Both were hit against 100 mph pitches which is supposed to be a record in the pitch tracking era.
So last night Ryan Pressly allowed his first run of the season, in the Astros’ 52nd game. He was 2/3 of the way to 60 straight scoreless innings, which would have been quite something.
Padres set a new franchise home run record with 7 in their obliteration of the Blue Jays Saturday, 19 - 4. The wife is very happy.
At what point do we just have to assume the Twins are legit? The should be a lock to get to the post season.
The line-up can rake top to bottom, fielding is solid, the pitching is decent with room for improvement (looking at you, Pineda).
More importantly, they actually won a game in New York.
The Cubs also did this very effectively. But a rebuild is only as good as the people strategizing it, with a good dose of luck, e.g. how good a particular draft class is. And the more teams that do it, the less likely you are to get the #1 or #2 pick that would get you a franchise-altering player.
The Cubs also got lucky in that they were able to victimize a dumber GM to do a lopsided trade for Anthony Rizzo. Trades like that don’t come along very often. The whole sequence of events with the Padres just letting Jed Hoyer and Jason McLeod walk out the door to Chicago for no compensation (a lip-service PTBNL that never actually changed hands and was only brought up because the Red Sox were in a snit about Theo Epstein) and then fleecing SD for Rizzo three months later still makes me shake my head.
this article thinks the cubs are going somewhere this season MSN
Look stats are wonderful and they can predict a lot in aggregate, but ultimately the only stat that actually matters for a team is the final score and as of the loss last night, they are 9-21 in save opportunities. That’s…not a good stat and outweighs a lot of the other good ones. If your starters have a 1.5 ERA and the bullpen has a 2.5 ERA (all good numbers) and you average 3.0 runs per game, it’s not going to end well.
ETA: The Cubs are on top of the Division right now and there is time to fix things, but they should be running Twins type numbers and are losing games they shouldn’t. That’s concerning to me this early in the season.
I know the Yanks are feasting on some really bad teams, but this run of success with “The Replacements” is really like nothing I can recall seeing. They now have a .667 winning percentage.
This is while missing their top two offensive players and ace along with a dozen more players.
Been enjoying the Jays/Padres series. All the rookies. Amazing.
I see the Jays will have a future in the post season one day. So much raw talent.