The Global Game of Professional Baseball
When it comes to professional baseball, it’s easy for those of us in America to have a myopic view of the sport. We exist in the land of Major League Baseball after all. MLB and Minor League baseball represent all we need to care about when it comes to professional baseball. I used to hold true to that mantra, for many, many years I believed MLB was all there was to the professional side of the sport of baseball.
What if I told you that wasn’t true? What if I told you there’s also an entire world of professional baseball beyond MLB just waiting to be discovered?
The more disenfranchised I have become with MLB the more I realized that there are avenues for me to get my baseball fix without dealing with the joyless husk that MLB has become. The deeper I dug the more I became aware of the professional leagues that dot the globe who are just as worthy of my attention as a baseball fan.
Don’t get me wrong, with a few exceptions I’m not about to argue that these leagues are on the same level talent-wise as MLB. The thing is though, that’s not all that important to me. I care about compelling games, playoff races, and players I enjoy watching play the game of baseball. Give me those and I’m a happy camper.
Turns out there are plenty of leagues all over the world that leave me feeling like a happy camper. Not just in the summer either, but the spring, fall, and winter are chock full of high-quality, compelling professional baseball.
There are professional leagues on five of the seven continents. Not just some either, we’re talking multiple countries on every continent. Mexico, Nicaragua, America, Italy, Australia (where OTBB editor Ari Glantz played for a while), Japan, South Korea, Germany (where OTBB founder Sean Morash played for a while, Switzerland, Cuba, and on, and on, and on have top-flight pro leagues that are worth the time to check out.
Checking them out is the most important part of that last sentence. We live in a time period where the internet and the ability to stream have made it where more professional baseball is available to watch than ever before. Just about every single pro league is available to stream in some fashion. A lot of leagues have their own services where you can watch every single game. Others utilize services like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch where the streams tend to be more team-specific and only show select games. We live in an unprecedented era of accessibility and availability for leagues and organizations that exist outside of MLB’s purview.
I’m not expecting or even asking people to be like me and give up on MLB. That was a conscious decision I made to ensure that I could continue to enjoy the game of baseball. Maybe I’ll return to MLB one day, but my lesson has been learned. There’s a wide world of baseball out there to bask in and enjoy. Even if I do go back to watching MLB in the future there will always be other pro baseball leagues to watch as well. That’s all I’m asking, give the other leagues a chance and realize that there is more to the world of professional baseball than just MLB.
