Not sure about this writer.Sour Apple?
He called this a MLB stunt.





Red Sox-A's from Japan just an MLB stuntby Dayn Perry
Dayn Perry is a frequent contributor to FOXSports.com and author of the new book, "Winners: How Good Baseball Teams Become Great Ones" (Available now at Amazon.com).
Updated: March 25, 2008, 12:25 PM EST add this RSS blog email print As you may have heard, the Boston Red Sox and Oakland A's opened the 2008 season in Japan.

Japanese fans are of course giddy, enthused and appreciative of watching live, "for keeps" American baseball once again. That would be the case with any game. However, throw Daisuke Matsuzaka and the defending champs into the mix, and you can understand how Tuesday had the atmosphere of a national holiday in the Land of the Rising Sun.
Here in the U.S., however, fans were quite a bit less stoked about a game that was played before sunrise. Who stateside watched this game on TV? Insomniacs? Unemployed Sox and A's fans? Problem drinkers/baseball writers? The more germane answer is: not many people at all. Therein lies the rub.


Under Bud Selig, everything baseball does is in the service of growing revenues. This is at least marginally defensible because, after all, MLB is a business. And according to some projections, MLB will surpass the NFL in revenues this year, so it's clear Selig — whether due to cash grabs like interleague play, extorting publicly funded stadiums, leveraging the Web medium or cultivating foreign markets, to name only a few — is very good at making money.

It also makes perfect sense for MLB to tap into the Japanese market. Baseball is now a global game, and the Pacific Rim is particularly engaged by the sport. There's money to be made, and, on a lesser level, there are are more Ichiros and Dice K's to be lured to MLB. That's all well and good.

But there are downsides to all of this. Teams don't like going to Japan — as the Red Sox's players have amply demonstrated — but that's not really the most serious problem. There will always be complaints of "hangovers," but we simply have no idea whether there's any merit to those claims. (The 2000 Mets and 2004 Yankees certainly did fine despite playing their openers in Japan.) No, the real problem is that it's a disservice to fans in the States and in Canada.




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Too often, appeals to "think of the fans" are gateways to nonsense. You know, "fan walkouts" and similar pointlessness. Fans are consumers who purchase the product. If they don't like the product or if you sufficiently alienate them, they won't purchase it. Fans are entitled to exactly as much as it takes to get them to buy tickets, merchandise, television packages, beer, and hot dogs — nothing more, nothing less.

However, there's also the public trust element involved.

This isn't the occasion to rhapsodize about baseball's place in the American consciousness and how our love of the game has ferried us through wars, economic downturns, and other forms of blight. All that's true enough, but paeans are tedious. Still, more than any other sport, baseball — mostly because of its uniqueness and force of its history — is obligated to undertake change with an appropriate sense of restraint. In (repeatedly) choosing to open the season in Japan, MLB runs afoul of this very basic principle.

Depending on your tastes, Opening Day is up there with or demonstrably better than (the correct answer) Super Bowl Sunday, the first day of the NCAA Tournament and other great one-day spectacles of sport. More than the World Series, more than the All-Star Game, it's Opening Day — almost everyone's team in action, hopes undimmed for all — that is baseball at its inclusive best. However, when baseball deigns to kick off the season on the other side of the world, at a time when most Americans are in full snooze, and days before the rest of the teams open their seasons, it diminishes the event. So Opening Day is really Sorta-Kinda Opening Day.

In the near-term, it's safe to say this is a money maker for MLB, and even going forward it probably won't exact any sort of cost in strict terms of dollars and cents. However, the "outsourcing" of Opening Day is something to be lamented. Opening Day without the "opening" is just, well, a day. Opening Day should be our first taste and glimpse of regular-season baseball each year; it shouldn't require qualifiers, as it does in this, the age of "Opening Day: The Sequel."

To be sure, some traditions are worth trashing — wearing ties, writing thank-you notes, or Andy Rooney, for instance — but others, like Opening Day, are to be preserved. Selig, in his restive search for more dollars, is far too willing to subvert tradition in baseball (the day he expands the playoffs again is the day the people should rise up in bloody revolt), but growth doesn't always require change. Some things have been around for so long because they're as close to perfect as anything of human design can be. Opening Day was once one of those things.

So, MLB and Japan, go forth, enjoy the game, and make money. Afterward, though, we'd kindly appreciate it if you'd give us our Opening Day back.