{"id":16748,"date":"2013-05-27T11:12:23","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T10:12:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=16748"},"modified":"2013-05-27T11:12:23","modified_gmt":"2013-05-27T10:12:23","slug":"weekly-hit-ground-ball-baseball-at-the-etihad-stadium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/?p=16748","title":{"rendered":"Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Baseball at the Etihad Stadium?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I was planning to take a Bank Holiday break with my Monday morning Weekly Hit Ground Ball column; however the recent news of a tie-up between Manchester City and the New York Yankees deserves a mention.<\/p>\n

The main news<\/a> concerns the creation of an expansion team in Major League Soccer called\u00c2\u00a0New York City Football Club (NYCFC). Man City will be the majority owners – it’s fair to say they’ve got the money – and the Yankees will be “an active member of the ownership group”.<\/p>\n

This past week saw Man City and Chelsea play two exhibition games in America, one in St. Louis and then one in New York. Watching the teams playing football at Busch Stadium and Yankee Stadium made for a slightly odd sight, but it did provoke the thought that if English teams can play football in baseball stadiums, why not bring a couple of baseball teams over here to return the compliment and play in football stadiums.<\/p>\n

Baseball teams have a long history of playing on English football grounds, be it British teams using these facilities or teams crossing the pond for exhibitions, such as the New York Giants and Chicago White Sox playing in front of a crowd including King George V at Stamford Bridge in 1924.\u00c2\u00a0With the NFL, NBA and NHL all having played games in London in recent years, it would be great to see MLB following suit.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are significant logistical issues in bringing MLB teams over to Britain.<\/p>\n

A football stadium doesn’t offer ideal dimensions within which to set out a Major League standard field. MLB players might be prepared to put up with this for a couple of exhibition games, but it wouldn’t provide the best backdrop from which to showcase the sport, from the point of view of the fans in the stadium or those watching on TV.<\/p>\n

Ideally MLB would want to come to Europe to play games in a dedicated ballpark. The impressive new facility<\/a> currently taking shape in Hoofddorp, just outside of Amsterdam, would be the most likely setting for any games in this continent.<\/p>\n

Even with a ballpark to use, finding a space in the calendar would be the biggest obstacle. Spring Training would make sense from the perspective of the teams but, as British teams know only too well, expecting ‘baseball weather’ in Blighty during March would require a substantial amount of optimism on the part of the organizers. The same could also be said for the Netherlands and it would be more likely that regular season MLB games would be brought over around the All-Star break. If the teams were playing ‘games that count’ then that would increase the desire for any games to be played in an actual ballpark with ‘normal’ baseball dimensions.<\/p>\n

However where there’s a will – and money – there’s a way. Maybe the Yankees will enthral Man City owner\u00c2\u00a0Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan so much that he will reach down the \u00c2\u00a0back of one his sofas and find some loose change to build a ballpark in or around Manchester. We can but dream.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, here’s a mocked-up image of what the Etihad Stadium would look like with a baseball diamond at one corner.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The short left-field wall wouldn’t appeal to the pitchers, but it looks a good sight for the rest of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Man City and the New York Yankees<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[503,553],"class_list":["post-16748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-hit-ground-ball","category-mlb-2","tag-featured","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16748"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16757,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16748\/revisions\/16757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}