Emerging from the shimmering heat in the desert outskirts of Dubai is an unfamiliar sight in the Middle East, a baseball field.
Now that it’s built, though, one question remains: Will the fans come?
That’s the challenge for the inaugural season of Baseball United, a four-team, monthlong contest that began Friday at the new Barry Larkin Field.
It’s named for an investor who is a former Cincinnati Reds shortstop, has the exact dimensions of the field at Yankee Stadium in New York, and is artificially turfed for the broiling sun of the United Arab Emirates.
The professional league seeks to draw on the sporting rivalry between India and Pakistan and their large number of expatriates in the Emirates. On Friday, the Mumbai Cobras played the Karachi Monarchs. Each team has Indian and Pakistani players seeking to break into the broadcast market saturated by soccer and cricket in this part of the world.
And while having no big-name players from Major League Baseball, the league has created some of novel rules to speed up games and put more runs on the board — and potentially generate interest for U.S. fans as the regular season there has ended.
“People here have got to learn the rules anyway so if we get to start at a blank canvas then why don’t we introduce some new rules that we believe are going to excite them from the onset,” Baseball United CEO and co-owner Kash Shaikh told The Associated Press.
The dune of dreams
The season ends in mid-December and all games will be played at Baseball United’s stadium in an area known as Ud al-Bayda, some 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. The stadium sits alongside The Sevens Stadium, which hosts an annual rugby sevens tournament known for hard-partying fans drinking restricted alcohol and wearing costumes.
The field seats some 3,000 fans and will host games mostly at night, though the weather is starting to cool in the Emirates as the season changes. But environmental concerns have been kept in mind — Baseball United went for an artificial field to avoid the challenge of using more than 45 million liters (12 million gallons) of water a year to maintain a natural grass field, said John P. Miedreich, a co-founder and executive vice president at the league.
“We had to airlift clay in from the United States, airlift clay from Pakistan” for the pitcher’s mound, he added.
Beside the Cobras and the Monarchs, the inaugural league also features the Arabia Wolves of Dubai and the Mideast Falcons from Abu Dhabi.
The changes to the traditional game in Baseball United put a different spin on the game similar to how Twenty20 drastically sped up traditional cricket. The baseball league has introduced a golden “moneyball” which gives managers three chances in a game to use an at bat to double the runs scored off a home run. A similar “fireball” automatically ends an inning if a pitcher strikes out a batter.
Teams can call in “designated runners” three times during a game. And if a game is tied after nine innings the teams face off in a home run derby to decide the winner.
“It’s entertainment, and it’s exciting, and it’s helping get new fans and young fans more engaged in the game,” Shaikh said.
America’s pastime has limited success
Baseball in the Middle East has had mixed success, to put a positive spin on the ball.
American supporters launched the professional Israel Baseball League in 2007, comprised almost entirely of foreign players. However, it folded after one season. Americans spread the game in prerevolution Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE over the decades, though it has been dwarfed by soccer. Saudi Arabia, through the Americans at its oil company Aramco, has sent teams to the Little League World Series.
But soccer remains a favorite in the Mideast, which hosted the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Then there’s cricket, the biggest sporting passion in India and Pakistan. The International Cricket Council, the world governing body, has its headquarters in Dubai near the city’s cricket stadium.
Organizers know they have their work cut out for them. At one point during a news conference Thursday they went over baseball basics — home runs, organ music and where center field sits.
“The most important part is the experience for fans to come out, eat a hot dog, see mascots running around, to see what baseball traditions that we all grew up with back home in the U.S. — and start to fall in love with the game because we know that once they start to learn those, they will become big fans,” Shaikh said.
On Friday night, attracting fans to the stadium appeared to be a challenge as laborers on buses filled one section of seats after being given a free Karachi Monarchs shirt, snacks and water.
Still, they cheered along with other more experienced, somewhat inebriated baseball fans and filmed selfies as cheerleaders performed between innings. Beers on tap cost over $13, expensive for a laborers’ salary, which can be just a few hundred dollars a month.
The game’s first pitch saw Monarchs batter Pavin Parks hit a home run. “Fireballs” saw the top and the bottom of the seventh and the top of the eighth end with one strikeout, speeding along a game as the crowd thinned. Parks hit a ninth inning “moneyball” home run, the game’s first. The Monarchs won 6-4.
In a nod to its desert environs, the starting pitchers for each team came into the game on camels.
“Thirty years in the game and I’ve never seen a camel in the bullpen,” Monarchs pitching coach Frank Gonzales said. “I kind of like it though.”
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