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The Australian baseball community is buzzing. For the first time ever, the big league is coming to our doorstep.
The Los Angeles Dodgers and the Arizona Diamondbacks will open the 2014 Major League Baseball season with two games on the hallowed turf of the Sydney Cricket Ground in March.
It’s the first time an MLB match will be staged in Australia and only the sixth time one has been taken outside of the United States.
Suffice to say, this is a pretty amazing coup. Having an MLB game in this country has long been a dream of the small but hardy Australian baseball clique that has stuck with the sport through decades of near-anonymity.
That this dream will finally come true should give the game a much-needed leg up. No doubt the chief purpose for the MLB’s bold gambit down under must be converting the uninitiated.
Trouble is, the obstacles are already starting to present themselves.
The attendance figures from the two games – on March 22 and 23 – will tell the true story, but if the social media reaction yesterday to the release of ticket prices is any indication, the coup has backfired.
The cheapest seats up in the outfield at the SCG will set you back $69. The home plate experience? A cool $499.
That’s just for a single game – so if you want to take in the whole series, as many purists do, then double those figures.
It’s great that we have the pull that makes MLB think we’re a country worth spending time in, but if that is the price we have to pay to bring this to our shores… maybe it isn’t worth it.
In comparison with other sporting events in Australia, that is simply obscene. For a sport that has so much ground to make up, it is suicidal. The outrage online was palpable.
It should have been good news – a walk, perhaps, in baseball parlance. Instead, I’m getting visions of Bill Buckner.
There are committed baseball fanatics – and I’m probably going to be one of them – that would be happy to spend that kind of money to experience an MLB game on home soil.
But this exercise is a waste of time if it is only going to preach to the converted.
It will only further the game in Australia if those with a passing interest or less in baseball come to the SCG and realise the game is worth their time and that the ABL might tickle their fancy.
It will be impossible to convince a large chunk of what should be the target market to part with $69 – at a bare minimum – for something they’re not even that sure they’re going to enjoy.
It would almost be cheaper for some fans outside of NSW to actually fly to LA and sit behind home plate at Dodgers Stadium than to do it in Sydney.
A half-empty SCG and a deserted game two is exactly what the Australian Baseball Federation and the ABL cannot afford – fiscally and figuratively.
If this fails, and the ABL doesn’t get a huge boost out of it, what happens to the ABF and MLB’s joint-venture?
This is high risk, moderate reward. It is a promotional vehicle that, if successful, should remind middle Australia that, yes, people play baseball here – and we’re actually not too bad at it.
Nobody expects baseball to catch on like football in Australia has post-Del Piero.
But on the flip side, if this doesn’t work out, it could be a disaster.
Ticket prices are already one of the big reasons why ABL crowds are no good, aside from general baseball apathy and almost zero promotion, advertising or media coverage.
The average attendance for the last ABL season was just 1096 – a steady decrease from the 2010-11 reboot season.
If baseball wants to make the leap from tier three niche curiosity to something Australians actually know and care about, it has to do things better than all the other sports in the country, and make greater gains.
The cold hard truth is that so far, that is not even close to happening. Early indications are it may stay that way for a while yet.
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