'You want to make sure you get it right': Baseball's big plans for London

Major 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.

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Baseball knows that by bringing two of the United States’ most iconic teams and the game’s biggest rivalry, it has a rare opportunity to build momentum in a new and potentially lucrative European market. And so the league is trying to do anything it can to make London Stadium look like a big league ballpark, giving British fans the impression they are actually at an American baseball stadium.

This isn’t easy to do. London Stadium, built for the Olympics and home to West Ham United and athletics events, doesn’t have the natural look of a quaint American ballpark. Transforming it into something that closers resembles Yankee Stadium takes significant work. Which is why several people from the league’s UK office were in Washington over the past week for the All-Star Game, studying Nationals Park and creating a blueprint that will give off the feel of a major league game.

“There are a lot of additions to ensure that it isn’t any old stadium but actually built like a ballpark,” Charlie Hill, the managing director of MLB’s UK office told the Guardian on Monday. “For a number of people in the UK this will be their first time to go to a baseball game. You want to give them something that feels compelling, exciting and different and a special thing.”

This means moving seats in the stadium to create a ballpark’s intimacy, as well as building party decks and special seating areas that are normal in most US major league stadiums. But it also means making dugouts and building baseball clubhouses on the indoor running track beneath the stadium’s stands. Which is more than baseball has done in any of the other places it has gone for regular-season games.

The locker rooms in London Stadium are excellent for soccer, Hill said, yet current major league clubhouses are significantly larger with more amenities. A decision was made to create clubhouses that resemble those in big US parks.

“Especially with those two teams, they are so iconic, you want to make sure we get it right,” Hill said.

But nothing in the project will be bigger than the field that baseball must build. In the league’s other international endeavors they used existing baseball fields. Even the stadium in Monterrey, Mexico, where the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres played earlier this season, had a new artificial surface that is used by the local Mexican league team. There is no way to cut infield dirt into West Ham’s pitch. Instead, baseball is going to install a field on top of the soccer pitch, laying a protective cover over the grass and installing new sod a few inches above the current playing surface.

All for two baseball games.

Unlike the NFL, baseball isn’t trying to establish a regular UK presence and seems to have no aspirations of a full-time London franchise. The two Yankees-Red Sox games next season – and two more in 2020 between two teams that haven’t been chosen – represent a chance for baseball to find new followers. Already, Hill said, the interest in tickets shown from people in the UK has been a surprise to Major League Baseball. That has put more pressure on the league to create as authentic a feel as possible.

“How would you transform the London Stadium, the Olympic stadium into a baseball field?” Hill asked. “I don’t think it’s pragmatically how do you build a field, how to you build clubhouses but how do you generate an atmosphere that is actually a baseball atmosphere?”

The All-Star Game provides some guidance because it is a big event with side attractions like fan festivals that baseball hopes to operate during London’s games. But even as Hill and his staffers walked around Nationals Park, just as they have Yankee Stadium and Boston’s Fenway Park, they are not trying to copy what they see but take ideas that can be implemented in London Stadium. For instance, the layout of London Stadium will limit the center field fence to roughly 390ft – making it a very much a hitter’s park.

“This is a blank canvas,” he said. “But London Stadium has its own certain character.

“Every ballpark is unique. Ours will be too.”