Boston Red Sox to Play in Australia in 2010?

Sometimes professional sports leagues do things I really just don’t understand.

According to the Daily Telegraph in Australia, the Boston Red Sox will play a major league game in Australia in 2010. The newspaper sites that talks have been ongoing now for a couple of months between the Red Sox and Sydney officials.

The games would be played at the Sydney Cricket Ground .

I understand that baseball wants to expand their game outside of the United States, which is why we have the World Baseball Classic, but this is ridiculous.

This is like the NFL playing games in London, but worse.

Why do Commissioners feel the need to force their sport onto countries who don’t care? People in London don’t care about football and people in Australia don’t care about baseball.

Will the games sell out in Australia? Sure they will–any novelty will sell out in any country. But the World Cup sold out in the United States and still nobody cares about soccer in America.

This is worse than the NFL playing games in London because of the time travel. To travel 18 or so hours to Australia and then have to deal with a 16 hour ahead time difference is a lot to ask of a baseball team.

It took players from the New York Yankees, Chicago Cubs, New York Mets, and Red Sox weeks to recover from trips to Japan in recent years. And in Mike Mussina’s case, it took him a whole year to recover from playing in Japan.

At least when these teams go to Japan, baseball is Japan’s number one sport. The Japanese are extraordinarily passionate about baseball. That’s clearly not the case in Australia.

Let’s just call this what it really is: a way for Major League Baseball to generate revenue from a country that generates very little revenue for Major League Baseball.

No official announcement has been made yet by Major League Baseball and a potential opponent has not been determined.

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