As the players took the field, I almost wept. America's game had come to London. Proper Major League Baseball, with two legendary teams (the Yankees and the Red Sox), the national anthem, the seventh inning stretch, hot dogs, Cracker Jack and rallying tunes on an organ. I never thought I'd see the day.As a St. Louisan, baseball is something more to me than just a sport. It's a foundational part of my childhood, a significant plank of my civic identity and the embodiment of summer. It helped me survive difficult times as a younger woman and the sound of a broadcast still brings a sense of calm ... even if I'm not really paying attention. When I first came to the UK, its loss was like severing a limb. These were the earliest days of the internet: I could get game scores, but not much else. In search of a substitute, I had a brief flirtation with cricket (an excellent game, but not mine) before mlb.com launched, allowing me to watch and listen to my home team. A live game was still a rare treat only to be savoured during visits to my homeland, but at least I had some form of baseball in the UK.
Now, for one glorious weekend a year, I have the real thing.
Major League Baseball (MLB) pulled out the proverbial stops to create magic in and around the event. With a few notable exceptions, they succeeded. And the players almost seemed to collude, though I doubt they intended to.
We went to the first game on the Saturday night, in which the Yankees beat the Red Sox 17-13. Those who'd never seen a game, including my godson and his father, were treated to a crazy match up including a 6-run-per-team, hour-long first inning that neither of the starting pitchers completed. Fourteen more pitchers trekked to the mound to try to control things in the course of the game. It appears they weren't coping well with jet lag, since they combined to give up 37 hits. The Yankees scored 11 between the third and fifth innings; the time it took us to grab and consume a beer and a hot dog from the concession stands. (Rather oddly, these are built with no view of the field and there are no tv screens relaying live action, so when you leave your seat you're blind to what's happening.) The Red Sox made a thrilling attempt at a comeback with a six-run 7th, most of the action coming when there were already two outs on the board.
"This isn't a normal baseball game," I warned my godson, whose 10-year-old eyes were still gleaming with excitement well into this marathon. Not normal, perhaps, but a beguiling introduction.
Even if the game had been a low-action pitching duel, organisers had laid on enough baseball-themed distractions to keep newbies interested. A London DJ combined with pre-recorded, traditional organ flourishes to add a soundtrack to the game. Traditions from ballparks around the USA entertained between innings: racing against "The Flash" from Atlanta, a stadium-wide chorus of "Sweet Caroline" from Boston, the grounds keepers dancing to YMCA as they smoothed the infield (a Yankee tradition), slingshots firing free tee shirts into the crowd and a strange bobble head race with Freddie Mercury, Winston Churchill, Henry VIII and the Loch Ness Monster. MLB actually trained food and drinks vendors to climb up and and down aisles selling their wares direct-to-seats, something unknown to British sport. They lacked the jovial banter and booming sales calls of their American counterparts, but the innovation of being able to get a drink without leaving your seat was a godsend. One can only hope that a member of the Twickenham management team was there and inspired.
The opening ceremonies were worthy of a World Series game, with giant flags, plumes of fire, pop stars and celebrity first pitches. Britain's most famous trans-Atlantic couple, Prince Harry and his American-born wife Meghan, took official first pitch duties along with a crowd of athletes from the Invictus games. (Piers and I are happy to demonstrate the Special Relationship next time if the Sussexes are not available.)
The London Stadium (still known by most Londoners as the Olympic Stadium) hosted the games, and organisers worked an impressive transformation turning a 66,000-seat athletic arena with an oblong field into a round baseball venue. To do this they raised the playing surface and built new stands along the baselines. It was still a bit odd, with huge spaces in the foul zones, almost no room behind home plate and awkwardly-placed scoreboards almost impossible to see clearly from our nosebleed seats in the outfield upper deck, but it worked far better than I had expected.
The stadium grounds opened four hours in advance and it was well worth getting there early to walk around the former Olympic site (now a lushly-landscaped park) and visit "Playball Park", a baseball-themed amusement zone set up on a field and running track next to the stadium. There were batting cages, pitching cages with ball speed trackers, a "home run derby", a mini-diamond to try base running and a diving catch station where you could leap with glove in hand into a bed of foam to get captured on slo-mo camera. This was all free and staffed by coaches from the UK's amateur baseball leagues. (Yes, they exist, and were very active in producing and hosting the London Series.) The biggest problem in this area? The wait. In order to play anything you needed a wristband. To get the wristband you had to sign a disclaimer form. And whoever designed that form, to be completed on iPads in bright sunlight, one per individual, gave no thought to speed or efficiency. It took us 40 minutes to clear this hurdle, and we had arrived soon after the gates opened. One hopes they'll speed things up next year.
This, as with all the other organisational issues, seemed to come from a failure to anticipate demand. Ticket sales back in November were a nightmare, with immediate sell-outs as each tranche of seats was released. Vast numbers of disgruntled fans took to Twitter to air their disappointment. It was understandable to start with a great rivalry like the Yankees and Red Sox, but those two cities are close enough to London to make a long weekend trip possible. Season ticket holders could buy eight seats per person, per game, well in advance, wiping out swathes of seats before British residents ever got a chance. Ticketmaster's booking system gave you no choice of seating area. If you were lucky enough to get in before availability sold out, you got whatever "best seats" the computer generated. And you'd better have deep pockets. The worst seats were £65. Anything along the baselines on the lower deck was approaching £300.
Merchandising was oddly limited to one large, pop-up store in a tent closer to Westfield Shopping Centre than the stadium. I'd guess many fans coming from alternate routes never saw it. Even so, there were enormous queues to get in and enormous ones to check out. By the time we got in (on our way home) stock was wiped out. There was nothing for sale in the stadium. I might have been tempted by the £37 London Series long-sleeved tee shirt had it been easier to purchase, but I just couldn't cope with more waiting to hand over more money.
Ultimately, those were small hiccoughs in an extraordinary event that brought something new and fresh to London.
Cricket fans are used to the "it ain't over til it's over" ethos, but most other sport in the UK is played to a clock, so pre-game mailers had warned that there was no way of predicting the end point of a baseball game. That was a wise move. At four hours and 42 minutes, London's inaugural MLB contest was just three minutes short of the longest nine-inning game in MLB history. We had to bail at the end of the seventh to have any chance of decent trains home. Lesson for next year: book a room in town.
Next year, when my beloved Cardinals play the Cubs. June 13 & 14, 2020. When they take the field I suspect I really will weep for pure, unadulterated joy.
