Offshore outsourcing often takes valuable things away from the United States. While it may be money and jobs that are often the most noticeable and talked about of these losses, there is another item that has been taken from the States by outsourcing: baseball’s opening day.
That’s right, the opening day of baseball season, once as great an American tradition as apple pie and fireworks on the Fourth of July, has been given away.
For the second straight season the first official pitch of Major League Baseball’s season didn’t take place in Detroit, or Cleveland, or New York or even Toronto (which for all intents and purposes is part of America from April to October) but in Japan.
Yogi Berra once said, “A home opener is always exciting, no matter whether it’s at home or on the road.”
Berra wasn’t around to see one of them played in Japan because when the first home opener of 2008 occurred — Oakland “hosting” a 6 a.m game Eastern time in Tokyo — most people were fast asleep.
For reasons that look good on paper, the MLB decided, for the second year in a row (and third time in the last nine years), to begin its season in Japan and with one of the league’s premier teams (last season it was the New York Yankees who got sent to Japan to take on Tampa Bay).
It’s not the playing of a game in a foreign country that is the problem. Doing so brings the sport attention and revenue, and it probably promotes some sort of goodwill toward the United States, all things that it is hard to have a problem with. Why do these have to be regular season games though?
Couldn’t Boston and Oakland just have played an exhibition game against each other instead? Would the folks in Japan not have cared if the games didn’t count as part of MLB’s standings?
Japan has it own regular season going on right now anyway. I doubt they really pay attention to our opening day when they have their own games going on.
And yes, America still has its opening day when 28 other teams kick off their seasons on March 31, but that doesn’t erase the fact that two games have already been put in the books.
Maybe this is too much of a patriotic, pseudo-xenophobic, Stephen Colbert-influenced approach, but as far as I’m concerned, the opening day of the MLB season belongs in (North) America, not Asia.
That’s not to say that our baseball league belongs only in America. Actually, the U.S. has been giving the Japanese the shaft when it comes to baseball for some time now; playing games over there is one way to mend that wall.
Indeed, Japan has a laundry list of baseball-related grievances it could file against America. For years our country has stolen Japan’s best baseball players; the MLB has the audacity to call its championship the World Series even though only two countries are represented; the inaugural World Baseball Classic was held in the states; and the Little League World Series takes place in Pennsylvania every year, even though the Japanese have built a pint-sized powerhouse.
These are all reasonable things to be upset about and are certainly things that should be fixed, but do we really need to offer them the start of our season to make up for it?
And isn’t international relations a two-way street? Shouldn’t they show us a little goodwill too?
Why can’t the Yomiuri Giants play the Hanshin Tigers at Fenway Park? Or maybe we could get a couple of the top sumo wrestlers to go at it in Madison Square Garden.
In any event, opening day is one of the last great international traditions, and I don’t see how fans across the nation can sit back and outsource it to Japan any longer.
It’s time to take a stand in defense of our pastime. It’s time to take back what is rightfully ours. It’s time to play ball.
Mike is a sophomore majoring in political science. If you’d like to see a translation of “Smack Talk” run in Japanese from now on he can be reached at [email protected].
