Sign me up for more Major League Baseball games in unique places.
Go to additional historic ballparks, like the Cardinals’ nearing visit to Birmingham’s Rickwood Field as a tribute to the Negro Leagues. Go to foreign lands. Go to places no one thought baseball could or would.
Baseball is entertainment. Sometimes we forget that. Entertainment means trying out new venues once in a while, reaching out to new audiences from time to time and attempting to expand your footprint always.
Already this season MLB teams have met in the Dominican Republic, in London, Mexico City and Seoul. Paris is on the radar. Tokyo, Mexico City and a return to Puerto Rico are reportedly in MLB’s plans for 2025.
Before the Cardinals and Giants were selected for this week’s tribute to the Negro Leagues, the Cardinals played in London (2023) and Mexico (2019) and in the Little League Showcase in Williamsport, Pennsylvania (2017). The team continues to be willing and active participants in these special showcases. That won’t change moving forward. It’s good for baseball and good for the Cardinals.
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Some get sour when an outside-the-box game or series breaks up baseball’s marathon grind. Not me. It shakes up the routine and gets me thinking about other things I’d like to see baseball (and the Cardinals) try to accomplish in the future. Here’s my latest personal wish list. Yes, some seem more realistic than others ...
- It seems like MLB’s return to Puerto Rico is coming. Good. The Roberto Clemente Series was once an annual staple in baseball and teams have made the trip many times over the years for spring training exhibitions, an opening day game, and even regular-season play. But not since 2018 has a team made this journey. And the Cardinals haven’t been on a Puerto Rico trip since 1980. If only there was a future Hall of Fame catcher turned Cardinals special front office adviser who lives there, is incredibly proud of his home and would be the perfect league ambassador for an overdue return. If the Cardinals can’t get Molina to ºüÀêÊÓƵ, maybe they can go to him?
Lars Nootbaar’s injury-affected season has dented his impact on this current Cardinals team, but he remains a big star in Japan, thanks to his help delivering a World Baseball Classic championshi
- p. The appeal of pairing Nootbaar’s Cardinals against Shohei Ohtani’s Dodgers should be too high for MLB to pass on the idea for very long. The Cardinals would be more than willing to play along as they work to expand their growing presence in Asia.
- Curt Flood belongs in Cooperstown. Hopefully we all agree on that. More important than being a two-time World Series champion, a three-time All-Star and a seven-time Gold Glove winner, Flood’s paving of the way to modern baseball’s free-agent process made him one of the most influential players in the game’s history. If the Hall of Fame is supposed to be a museum, Flood’s absence from it is embarrassing for sport. It won’t come in time for Flood to see it, but hopefully this wrong gets fixed one day. And when it does, how about a series between the Cardinals and the Reds, who Flood debuted for as an 18-year-old in 1956, to properly teach and celebrate his historic place in the game? Location? Cooperstown.
- How about a national parks tour? No, not Nationals Park. I’m thinking about Bryce Harper homering toward Mount Rushmore’s looming faces. I’m thinking about Giancarlo Stanton socking one toward the Grand Canyon. We need more people watching baseball. We need more people putting down their cellphones and getting outside. This could be a win-win, as long as no one takes their selfie sticks too close to where the buffalo roam.
- One of the cooler non-baseball things about Florida spring training trips is that, sometimes, you catch a glimpse of a Sunshine State rocket launch. It happened this past spring, when the Mets broadcast booth was floored (understandably) and quite distracted as the sendoff of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 lit up the sky above Port St. Lucie. MLB owners are billionaires. So is SpaceX founder Elon Musk. How about a spring training game that puts the action as close as safely possible to a rocket launch with a scheduled lift-off time right around when the post-game fireworks would normally start. It would be the next best thing to playing in space. And who knows, maybe that happens one day. We are in the launch angle revolution, after all.