Fans flocked to the Red Sox-Yankees clash in their droves to guzzle hot dogs, belt out YMCA – and see a sublime openingBaseball makes cricket look like an almost stat-free zone. This weekend in London records have been falling over themselves with a regularity that probably constituted a record in itself.But the one that will resound through Major League Baseball’s executive suite is this: its first two games played in Europe drew the sport’s highest attendances in 16 years. US baseball no longer even has a stadium that can hold 60,000 spectators, never mind fill it, near as dammit, in mid-season. So by coming to London the sport seems to be on to something – if not big, then at...
New York Yankees against Boston Red Sox will draw a bigger attendance for each game than the weekend’s two Cricket World Cup blockbusters combinedNearly seven years’ worth of Saturday nights have passed since what was then London’s Olympic Stadium played host to an exhibition of British sporting magnificence – which lasted a good half-hour. On Saturday comes the precise reverse: a weekend of something even more un-British than winning: the Yanks are coming – to play the most alien sport of all.In the 1980s, suborned by Channel 4, a sizeable minority of British sports followers became infatuated with that strange sport for sizeable people, American football. Basketball, being simple to organise and economical on space, has long been played in...
MLB is already at work to ensure next year’s London series between the Yankees and Red Sox is as authentic as possibleMajor League Baseball has staged regular-season games in Japan, Australia, Mexico and Puerto Rico. But nothing the league has attempted overseas comes close to the scope of what it plans to do when the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox cross the pond to play two games next June.“This will be our biggest (international) project yet,” Phil Bradley, the players’ union’s special assistant for domestic and international events, told the Guardian this week. Related: Will Yankees-Red Sox in London break the NFL's UK stranglehold? Continue reading...
Former Channel Five baseball co-host David Lengel believes Major League Baseball can make a splash in Britain despite a late startFor the tightly knit baseball community scattered throughout the UK and Ireland, Tuesday’s announcement from Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and London mayor Sadiq Khan was as big as it gets: the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox will play a pair of regular-season games at London’s Olympic Stadium in June 2019.For folks like myself, co-hosts Jonny Gould, Josh Chetwynd and others who passionately represented the sport on Channel Five’s baseball coverage from 1997 to 2008, the chance to finally see America’s national pastime on British soil is a champagne moment. Related: Red Sox and Yankees confirmed to...
From pre-season fringe player to MLB star, the rookie has taken the US by storm this summer in the Yankees’ march to unlikely post-season successOn Sunday night at Yankee Stadium, Francisco Lindor of the Cleveland Indians hit a baseball towards the right‑field stands that was clearly destined to be a two-run homer. And not just any home run: one that would demolish the New York Yankees and send the Indians to the edge of the World Series.Suddenly a great mitted hand rose from the depths, like the head of a sea monster, reached above the wall and snatched the ball from thin air. On its own, it was a superhuman catch: something more associated with the planet Krypton than the...