100 years after MLB’s first trip Down Under, the Dodgers and Diamondbacks opened the 2014 season with a 2-game series in Syndey. JP Pelosi reports on the culture clash.
There’s a hazy black and white photo of the Chicago White Sox in Sydney, Australia, 100 years ago, in which the flags atop the city’s venerable cricket ground are all flapping to the right.
It’s a windswept day with spectators perched on benches around the park, and lean men in coats and hats strolling about the grassy foreground. Small groups are huddled on the lawn to see the action, perhaps pondering the oddity of baseball at their favorite venue.
The White Sox beat the New York Giants 5-4 that windy summer, 100 years ago. Prior to playing each other, the tourists played a local team from New South Wales, in what The Sunday Times of Sydney called a “clever shadow game.”
“Throughout the Americans earned the approbation of the crowd by their alertness and combination,” the Times said. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I like it.
This type of scene gave Major League Baseball’s latest sojourn to Sydney an important precedent, one that many other international cities can’t match. But I realize it’ll take more than scrapbook nostalgia to convince you that the historic Opening Series in Australia was more than a chance for a few ball players to hug a koala.
Indeed MLB had its work cut out. They surely knew that a game hosted in another far off land, where bats are flat, not round, wouldn’t drag Americans out of bed, even those devoted to the Dodgers, the Diamondbacks, or the ongoing push by the corporatized sports world for global presence.
This was about sharing the love of the game.
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There was a comforting magic at these Sydney fixtures—played in Australia’s grandest stadium, the Sydney Cricket Ground (or “SCG”). 80,000 fans showed up to the SCG over the weekend to watch a game that’s as secondary to them as bobsledding, though at least no acronyms are needed when men careen down an ice shoot.
If you did tune in back in the States, along with other night owls like Batman and Dracula, then you likely spat out your Doritos at the sight of the beautiful diamond that replaced the sacred cricket ground. Remember, this hallowed place has hosted cricket for about 130 years. It’s almost as old as Abe Vigoda, and equally revered. It’s also seen some of the country’s most iconic sporting moments: it’s where legendary cricketer Don Bradman scored 452 runs for New South Wales against Queensland; where the St George rugby league team won its record 11th straight championship; and where Tony Lockett kicked his record setting 1,300th goal for the Australian rules football league.
So you see, there’s a wonder to the place, and cracking bats and crunching crackerjack and the silhouettes of capped and gloved ball players has only added to its mystique. As a column in The Sydney Morning Herald said on Monday, the ghosts of the SCG must have had a blast seeing what unfolded in their home. Eva Longoria enlarged on the jumbotron maybe helped too.
But baseball could do a whole lot worse than pitching itself Down Under because outside of manufacturing Hollywood hunks and wrestling crocodiles, Aussies love sport. Any sport. If you could somehow score men lobbing mangoes down Sydney’s George Street it’d instantly draw a crowd. Sydneysiders, especially, relish an event. And nine innings on the Cricket Ground is closer to an extravaganza.
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But baseball could do a whole lot worse than pitching itself Down Under because outside of manufacturing Hollywood hunks and wrestling crocodiles, Aussies love sport. Any sport.
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Atop the old members pavilion, with its green corrugated roofs and cast iron fences, the American and Australian flags waved congenially together. The wind swirled around the boundary, where outfielders stood. A sign draped over the old fencing read, ‘Sydney Baseball Ground’. Well, for a day or two.
Listen, like you, I had doubts about how it would work—baseball in a cricketer’s land, where meat pies are glorified and liters of lager are usually consumed over eight hours of play, not a mere three. It was like a surreal dream, really: Opposing colors and shapes collided, sounds foreign to one another smashed together, and at once, the image of a famous arena had turned upside down as if it had fallen victim to the brush of Rene Magritte.
But it somehow meshed: the pristine field topped with Californian clay, cold beers on the concourse, the restrained Wrigley-like billboards, restless ballhawks, and pretty girls in crisp caps. It could have been Chicago or Boston.
The old hot dog guy outside the stadium wanted to know what the score was when I left. He’s here all the time, grilling sausages and onions and slapping them into buns. If I told him the winning team, or number of hits, or how many innings Clayton Kershaw went, would it matter? Maybe not exactly but symbolically, yes. He was genuinely intrigued, just like everyone here. Such is the allure of this old game and its universal ability to capture imaginations.
I stopped for a burrito in a small cantina down the street from the park, past a pub called the Cricketers Arms, on a long avenue where hipsters wore straw hats and canvas sneakers, and a guy in a Dodgers cap asked if I’d been to the game. Perhaps as I tussled with the beastly wrap of beef and beans, I looked an unlikely candidate to have walked the steep inner-city hills behind us.
Photo: Rick Rycroft/AP