'We're closed, mate': Assessing MLB's chances in the U.K.
What I learned watching the Phillies and Premier League in London
Some people sightsee on vacation or retreat to a beach or go to Iceland. I make sure I am within walking distance of a bar that shows baseball, like Passyunk Avenue under London’s Waterloo station. It was impossible to catch the Philadelphia Phillies’ weeknight games against the Blue Jays, with my being five hours ahead of Toronto, so I anticipated Friday night’s game against the Washington Nationals like a sailor does shore leave. Watching the Phillies is the second-most stressful thing in my life. The first is not being able to watch them when they’re on.
My friend Maryam and I got to the bar just before midnight, sat at a table, then MLB.TV’s screensaver gave way to NBC Philly’s broadcast. It reminded me of why Americans overseas eat at McDonald’s. It’s familiar and in turn comforting, safe. All I needed was a pint. I looked for a server, but they didn’t see or ignored us. I walked up to the bar, where I interrupted an employee counting cash. He told me that they were closed. The empty seats, darkened kitchen, and quieted music started making sense. The internet lied to me. They weren’t open until 1:00 a.m. I couldn’t watch the first third of the game. I returned to our table and asked Maryam, a Londoner, how a city known for drunk, miserable humans addicted to sports could tolerate a bar closing at midnight on a Friday. She asked me who the hell I think watches baseball in England.
We Googled the nearest kebab, but then a server brought a Budweiser and said that we could stay until it was finished. He had recognized my weathered blue Phillies hat from the day before, when I had a Bud for lunch, and the day before that, when I had a Bud for lunch. He told us to come back the next day, too, when the Phillies were to play at 9:00 p.m. local. We’d be able to watch all nine innings, a full therapy session.
MLB is trying to wedge itself into British sports through the “London Series,” which the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox inaugurated in 2019 with two games that lasted, on average, four hours and thirty-three minutes. That crime against humanity could no longer be perpetrated when MLB resumed the series this year; thanks to the pitch timer, Brits were treated to a much tidier set between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals. The Phillies are scheduled to face the New York Mets at London Stadium next June. Promoting all of this is Phillies legend Chase Utley, whose official duties as MLB Ambassador to Europe seem both as important and dubious as those of a real-life ambassador.
On one hand, teams along the Northeast Corridor are practically as close to London as Los Angeles, and there’s no language barrier. MLB views the U.K. as their springboard into the broader European market. On the other hand, the U.K. removed itself from the European single market, which must be news to MLB, and the head coach of the Great Britain national baseball team is a full-time design executive from California. That’s a knock on the British Baseball Federation, not Drew Spencer, who has toiled in the boiler room of British baseball for years and is now lifting their national team to prominence—they debuted in the World Baseball Classic this past March—with probably less compensation and fewer resources than a pub-sponsored football team. Your local trophy shop, the one with the dusty and faded sports memorabilia in the window, could have made better jerseys than Great Britain’s.
During this year’s London Series, baseball writer Michael Baumann expressed frustration at MLB ignoring Amsterdam. The Netherlands has a long baseball tradition and the highest-ranked European national team, and again there would be no language barrier. “The average Dutch person speaks better English than the average person in at least six U.S. states,” Baumann pointed out. Italy, Czech Republic, and Germany also have stronger national teams and more discernible baseball cultures than Great Britain. CNN’s reporting unwittingly reflected this hierarchy when it quoted four Americans and a Canadian in its write-up on this year’s London Series. The only British attendee mentioned in the article doesn’t like baseball. This is all according to MLB’s plan, apparently, for the league pointed to [checks notes] its European social media followership tripling in the four years since 2019 to [checks notes] 452,000. A cynical read would be that the team owners who run MLB are simply more familiar with the U.K. and thus more comfortable investing their money there, so they reverse engineered a business case. Red Sox owner John Henry also owns Liverpool F.C., a traditional power in the Premier League. With one private flight to London he can take care of business in two multi-billion dollar sports leagues. But team owners never do anything cynical (or cheap). I look forward to MLB appointing ambassadors to, say, Mexico, Dominican Republic, or any other Spanish-speaking country that is closer to the U.S. and demonstrably mad for baseball.
Back at the bar Saturday, I asked the server who gave me a sympathy beer the night before why he’s a Phillies fan. Such an affliction is usually thrust upon someone at birth and not consciously chosen. It turned out his fandom was a bank shot. American football is played in amateur and semi-pro leagues throughout the country, he told me, and as a Northerner he gravitated toward the working class roots and fanbase of the Philadelphia Eagles. Most of their Sunday games are on British TVs in the evening. The Phillies grew on him during their run to the World Series last year. No one really plays baseball in England, though. He then told me that the kitchen was closing soon.
As we waited on our chips, I grew more skeptical of MLB’s proclaimed interest in “growing the game,” as capitalists say. The Phils-Nats matchup the next day would typically be finished by sundown, as most games are on Sundays, but MLB was featuring it in primetime as the “Little League Classic.” Like the London Series, it’s one of baseball’s many themed tentpole events, and this one makes sense. Young fans are the lifeblood of any sport, and watching big leaguers and Little Leaguers cheer each other on tugs at the heart and purse strings. Of course, Great Britain and I would be asleep for it. First pitch was scheduled for 12:05 a.m local.
I texted my Phillies Emotional Support Group back home after our team found themselves down 3-0.
“They don’t want to win. This team has no heart. None.”
The Phillies were many games over .500, firmly in a playoff spot, and one of the best teams in baseball since the start of June. That mattered none during the six desultory innings I subjected Maryam to. She being a tennis and football fan the commercial breaks pained her. I told her that in America sitting through ads is a civic duty and that baseball is as fast and fun as it's been in my lifetime. She asked if this was fast and fun.
We passed the time rating the looks of the players. (We decided in the end that everybody is beautiful.) And then finally: a spark. Heartthrob Nick Castellanos went deep in the seventh to tie the game. Pretty boy Trea Turner hit two homers in the eighth. When the last out was recorded the score was 12-3 in favor of Philadelphia. The season was saved.
“In football, a team down three almost never comes back,” Maryam said.
“A baseball team is technically never out of it because there is no game clock,” I said.
“Hm,” she said.
That morning, I had a couple coffees at the hotel bar, then walked the few blocks to Borough Market. The temperature was what I call “temperature.” Neither hot nor cold, the air left humanity alone, and the sky was cloudless. I did not know London turns into San Diego during the summer. After my early lunch I took the Tube across town to Hammersmith, where I was meeting Maryam. Amid rows and rows of townhomes and on a typically narrow and quiet street sat Craven Cottage, Fulham F.C.’s home grounds since 1896. If there wasn’t a crowd at its turnstiles, which are tucked within slits in the brick facade, then I would have missed it. American NIMBYs and suburbanites would be apoplectic over its presence and lack of parking and indeed Craven Cottage doesn’t keep with the neighborhood character—it’s too modest. The highest level of the world’s most popular sport is played on its pitch, the games broadcast to over 200 territories, and from the sidewalk the building looked no more elaborate and not much larger than an old library or firehouse. It was no more onerous to enter than a busy Sainsbury’s. We grabbed balti pies, then took our seats at the end line, front row. Ours were scalped tickets designated for juniors, and I braced for rejection when I had scanned mine at the entrance, but they were legit: Fulham really does price admission at less than $40. With little fanfare or pregame pageantry, and at a traditional 3:00 p.m. kickoff, one of the most consequential sporting events on planet Earth and my first Premier League match got underway.
We followed the departing crowds through a riverside park after the game and were shepherded to a pub showing Tottenham beating up Manchester United, the Yankees of football. Being in West London, there were few Spurs fans, but there were even fewer Man United fans. In whatever sport or place the people welcome the struggles of an evil empire, especially after beers. Attendees at football games in England can’t drink alcohol within sight of the pitch, so we were all catching up, sending the bartenders bumping into each other to fulfill our orders. The game ended, Maryam and I crossed the street to the Tube, got off at Embankment station at the very center of London, and made way on foot toward Passyunk Avenue. It was sunset. On a pedestrian bridge spanning the Thames people took photos of the skyline and of themselves. The Phillies comeback victory that evening completed the best day of my life.
I decided then I couldn't miss that Monday’s Crystal Palace-Arsenal match, so I dragged Maryam back out, this time to Selhurst Park stadium in South London. Like in Hammersmith, we slipped into an old stadium through slits in a brick facade, but the Palace supporters made Selhurst Park seem like Carl Spackler to Craven Cottage’s Judge Smails. Someone behind goal ignited a red flare to mark the kickoff, and the chanting and singing and taunting never stopped. When some fans recorded Arsenal’s successful penalty kick on their phones, a Palace diehard called them out for their traitorous behavior.
“This reminds me of last year’s NLDS Game 3,” I said at halftime. An unhinged crowd at Citizens Bank Park helped the Phillies overwhelm the superior Atlanta Braves.
“There are games like this in baseball?” she said.
“At least in the playoffs. At least in Philly,” I said.
“And this is just the second match of the season for a mid-table team,” she said.
Maryam’s local club is Brentford. According to Fulham supporters, they’re “just a bus stop in Hounslow!” (An equivalent taunt Stateside would be “You’re just a rest stop in Secaucus!”) But her and her father are obsessed with Chelsea, recently the most successful of London’s seven Premier League teams. Like many sports-minded millennials, I became familiar with Chelsea’s dominance in the 2000s through the FIFA video games. Didier Drogba was a one-man cheat code. Maryam got to see him in person in his prime. It set the table for our rooting for Palace. She despised Arsenal as Chelsea’s rival and I despised them for their taking forever on free kicks and throw-ins. Theirs was a pompous style of play. They looked annoyed that they had to play at all.
Alas, Palace couldn’t get the equalizer despite Arsenal playing the last third of the game down a man, for the Gunners defended like varsity jocks on a gym class dodgeball team. They played nice for a bit, then coldly smothered the helpless other side. Palace players passed the ball around Arsenal’s box looking for a lane that their bigger, better opponents would never allow. They’d still be out there making cross passes if it weren’t for the clock. Everyone filed out after the loss and civilly made their way through the neighborhood to the train station. During my nine-day trip I never left London and I never got in a motor vehicle. I didn’t need to.
America would never because it could never. We have just one city with world-class public transit. Homeowners protest apartments and bike infrastructure, let alone sports stadiums, confining everyone to cars. The stadiums we do have are overbuilt and overpriced and in industrial wastelands or the suburbs. Walkable communities are literally foreign. We allow no more than two teams in the same league to be based in the same city because media market monopolies are more important than competition, culture, and connection. MLB prevents paid subscribers from streaming their local teams’ games. We can’t wave people into a sporting event (and tolerate the celebratory, if technically illicit pyrotechnic) because there’s more guns than people in our country.
I want life in the States to be more affordable, accessible, efficient, and safe. I just want life here to be easier. That’s not because I’m an entitled coastal elite but because it would give me greater agency over my life. Ours is a country obsessed with freedom. I think that’s because we afford ourselves so little of it. I saw the future of baseball in London—the future of everything, really—and it looks nothing like what MLB owners think it does.
Get yourself a Brendan Dentino for all sporting events. 10/10.