MEXICO CITY — Major League Baseball is heading south of the border once more to play an everyday season collection. After earlier stops in Monterrey, Mexico City would be the host this time, and the timing appears excellent.
The San Diego Padres will play in opposition to the San Francisco Giants this weekend on the Alfredo Harp Helu (AHH) Stadium within the nation’s capital, the place followers are keen to observe extra baseball after Mexico’s deep run at the World Baseball Classic.
Bolstered by Cuban defector Randy Arozarena and Mexican-born large leaguers like Julio Urías and Jose Urquidy, Mexico made it to the semifinals earlier than dropping to eventual champion Japan. The journey included a surprising victory over the United States in Phoenix with tens of hundreds of Team Mexico followers readily available.
“Those two weeks of the World Baseball Classic are probably the ones where everybody was talking about baseball across the country more than ever before,” stated Horacio De la Vega, the president of the Mexican Baseball League.
“Clearly that outcome of the tournament is giving us a boost, we have packed stadiums in preseason games, while in the past we used to have them at 10-20% capacity,” added De la Vega in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have an unprecedented appetite for baseball.”
That curiosity in baseball was evident within the preseason but additionally final weekend when Liga Mexicana de Beisbol performed the primary collection of the common season.
PHOTOS: Mexico has “unprecedented appetite for baseball” after WBC
In the capital, followers flooded the gates of AHH Stadium for a three-day collection that includes the native Diablos Rojos del México enjoying in opposition to the Tigres de Quintana Roo.
“I’ve been a Diablos Rojos fan my whole life, so this is not a new passion for me, but I´ve known a lot of people that have been asking me recently about the sport and that they want to come and see if for themselves,” stated Ramiro Aguirre, a 35-year-old accountant who was on the stadium for the opening collection.
The $150 million AHH stadium opened in March of 2019 and has a 20,000 seat capability with six out of doors terraces and meals courts alongside a trident spear-shaped roof manufactured from metal.
The stadium was constructed on public land subsequent to the Autodromo Hermanos Rodríguez by Alfredo Harp Helu, a Mexican millionaire who can be a minority proprietor with the Padres.
Harp Helu, who additionally owns the Diablos Rojos, has a long-time want to have a serious league group in Mexico, however that concept won’t occur anytime quickly.
“I’ve never been close to the idea of Mexico as an expansion opportunity,” baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred stated earlier this week at an availability with sports editors within the U.S. “If you’re going to expand, you think about it. I think the challenges are facility based. Even the stadium that we’re playing in this weekend is probably not big enough for a permanent home for a major league club. And then our season is so long, I have a union issue there that would have to be bargained to get players to live for that long in Mexico.”
MLB nonetheless has large targets for Mexico, although. Manfred hopes it might grow to be a kind of North American equal to Japan, with “vibrant, domestic professional play, with star players getting the opportunity to come and play Major League Baseball.”
Notably, Japan has sturdy MLB viewership, and Manfred would love for the league to generate income from Mexico similarly.
Local video games are being broadcast this season by the three main networks in Mexico: Televisa, Tv Azteca and Imagen TV. Games are additionally out there on ESPN, Fox Sports and Amazon Prime, amongst others. MLB video games could be seen on Televisa, Imagen, ESPN and Fox Sports.
“We have three contracts for national networks that we did not have in 2022 and we are reaching 30 countries, something that never happened before,” stated De la Vega, who added that Liga Mexicana de Beisbol has a streaming service to offer all of the video games and highlights free of charge.
“What we’ve done with the TV is nothing minor, we understood that the way to consume baseball has changed, everybody is on a cellphone now, and this help us to have a larger audience,” he added.
MLB established an workplace in Mexico in 2016 that, amongst different issues, has been working to advertise the game with children.
“Our goal is to keep having major league regular season games until 2026, and we want to keep widening the fan base, we want more young people as well as women,” Rodrigo Fernandez, director of the MLB workplace in Mexico, informed The Associated Press.
Recently, Fernandez and MLB in Mexico organized an MLB Cup for boys 11-12 years outdated and for ladies underneath 15.
Although Fernandez agrees that the World Baseball Classic helped improve the game´s recognition in Mexico, he says the variety of followers has been rising steadily over the previous few years.
“A lot of Mexicans watched the team play in the World Baseball Classic and said ‘Wow, we are the third best team in the world’ and now they are looking and paying more attention to the sport, but that does not mean that we are just a trend or that all the things we’ve done in seven years did not have an effect,” Fernandez stated.
Mexico first hosted MLB video games in August 1996, when the Padres and Mexican ace Fernando Valenzuela confronted the New York Mets in Monterrey. The Padres confronted the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2018, and in 2019, the Cincinnati Reds performed the St. Louis Cardinals and the Houston Astros confronted the Los Angeles Angels.
Mexico City was as a consequence of host a collection between the Padres and the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2020, nevertheless it was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Now MLB is lastly coming again, and it could be essentially the most anticipated collection but.
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