Major League Baseball is London’s latecomer when it comes to America’s major sports.
12 years after the NFL first crossed the Atlantic for a regular season game in the capital and eight after the NBA followed suit, MLB finally came with some fanfare in 2019.
Arriving with arguably the two biggest franchises and perhaps its best rivalry in the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, it provided two sell-out games for that season.
Then Covid hit and momentum was lost, so, too, the planned 2020 games between an older and arguably even more bitter rivalry — namely the Chicago Cubs and St Louis Cardinals.
Four years on, this weekend the teams finally converge on London Stadium for Saturday and Sunday games with in excess of 100,000 tickets already sold and organisers expecting most of the remaining tickets to be snapped up in the final hours.
But can MLB find a foothold in London in quite the same way that NFL has clearly done, having found two homes for itself in Wembley and Tottenham Hotspur Stadium with three games between five different franchises in 2023 alone?
According to numbers from the online ticket marketplace viagogo, of the ticket sales for the 2019 London Series 44 per cent were bought by UK fans and 43 per cent from fans travelling from the United States. This year, the numbers are 66 per cent in favour of the UK-based fanbase - suggesting the audience is there in London and beyond.
Organisers would dearly love London Stadium to become baseball’s traditional home in the city. More games are scheduled there for 2024 and 2026, with a foray elsewhere in 2025, most likely Paris.
“We’d love it to be here to stay,” said MLB Europe managing director Ben Ladkin. “There is massive enthusiasm from the fanbase for baseball games in this country.
“We’re continuing the theme of bringing rivalries across, as sports fans understand the concept of rivalry. It’s over 130 years these two teams have played each other. It is a proper rivalry, because they’re quite close. And you get some give and take between fans.”
Central to that — almost taking the role of a pantomime villain — is Willson Contreras, who won the World Series with the Cubs in 2016 but made the switch to the Cardinals for this season. When he made his return to Wrigley Field last month, Cubs fans made their feelings very clear and, in turn, the Venezuelan catcher gave as good as he got.
There has already been a sporting crossover to the games. England cricketer Harry Brook is an official MLB ambassador and travelled over to the Cardinals to learn how to hit.
His England team-mate James Anderson will throw a ceremonial pitch, along with Ashes rival Nathan Lyon, to bring another lengthy sporting rivalry to the occasion ahead of next week’s Lord’s Test and one which is only marginally older than that of the Cubs and the Cardinals.
The roots of the rivalry stem from them being economic trade competitors in the late 19th century, plus there is 300 miles between the cities. Route 66 begins in Chicago, its first major stop St Louis, hence it often being referred to as the Route 66 rivalry.
On the pitch, the rivalry over the years has led to mass brawls between the two sides. The Cubs have the upper hand in terms of games won between the pair, while the Cardinals have a far better record when it comes to the World Series — 11 to three, although Chicago were the more recent winners, seven years ago.
Much like with the NFL, it will not simply be fans of both franchises in the stands, which are expected to be awash with jerseys of all sorts of MLB clubs.
As for London Stadium, it has undergone a two-and-a-half week facelift, while Trafalgar Square has been transformed into an MLB fan-hub for the weekend.
Baseball has a firm foothold in London for this weekend. The plan is for it to stretch that further and not make the sport simply about one weekend a year.
