Mexico City.- Major League Baseball returns to Mexico for a regular season series, but now the country’s capital is the venue and the timing seems perfect.
The San Diego Padres will play the San Francisco Giants this weekend at the Alfredo Harp Helú (AHH) Stadium in Mexico City, where fans are eager to see more baseball after Mexico’s great performance in the recent World Classic.
Randy Arozarena, who was born in Cuba, but also Julio Urías, José Urquidy, Giovanny Gallegos and manager Benji Gil led Mexico to a historic third-place finish in the tournament, fostering a renewed interest in baseball.
“Those two weeks of the World Classic are probably the most talked about baseball in history,” said Horacio De la Vega, president of the Mexican Baseball League.
Mexico lost to eventual champion Japan in the semifinals.
“Clearly that result of the tournament is giving us a boost, we have filled the stadiums in the pre-season games, whereas in the past we used to have them at 10-20 percent capacity,” De la Vega added in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have an unprecedented appetite for baseball.”
That interest in baseball became evident in the preseason, but also last weekend when the Mexican Baseball League staged the first series of the regular season.
In the capital, the fans flooded the doors of the AHH stadium for a three-day series in which the local Diablos Rojos del México played against the Tigres de Quintana Roo.
“I’ve been a Red Devils fan all my life, so this passion is not a new passion, but I know a lot of people who have been asking me about baseball recently and they say they want to come see if for themselves.” said Ramiro Aguirre, a 35-year-old accountant who was at the stadium for the opening series.
The $150 million AHH Stadium was inaugurated in March 2019 and has a 20,000-seat capacity with six outdoor terraces and adjacent food courts with a spear-shaped steel roof. trident.
The stadium was built on public land next to the Autodromo Hermanos Rodríguez by Alfredo Harp Helú, a Mexican millionaire who is also a minority owner of the Padres.
Harp Helú, who also owns the Diablos Rojos, has long had a desire to have a major league team in Mexico, but that idea will probably take time to materialize.
“I’ve never been close to the idea of Mexico as an expansion opportunity,” Commissioner Rob Manfred told The Associated Press Sports Editors Association earlier this week.
“I think the challenges are facility-based. Even the stadium we’re going to play in this weekend probably isn’t big enough to permanently house a major league team. And then our season is so long that I’ll have a union problem that would have to be negotiated for the players to live so long in Mexico”.
Manfred recognized the importance of Mexico as a market and said he works with the Mexican League because they would love it to be similar to the Japanese league – a “vibrant national professional sport with star players who have the opportunity to go play in the Major Leagues.” .
The commissioner also said that the Mexican League can resemble Japan in the television audience. And the Mexicans are on the right track in that sense.
The new season is being broadcast by the three main networks in the country, Televisa, TV Azteca and Imagen TV. But, in addition, they have games on ESPN, Fox Sports and Amazon Prime, among others.
“We have three national chain contracts that we didn’t have in 2022 and we are reaching 30 countries, something that has never happened before,” added De la Vega, who also said the league has a streaming service to provide all games for free.
“What we have done with television is not minor, we understood that the way of consuming baseball has changed, now everyone is on cell phones and that helps us to have a larger audience,” he added.
In addition to working with the professional league, MLB established an office in Mexico in 2016 that, among other things, has been working to promote the sport among children.
“Our goal is to continue having Major League regular season games until 2026, and we want to continue expanding the fans, we want more young people as well as women,” Rodrigo Fernández, director of MLB’s Mexico office, told the AP.
Fernández and MLB in Mexico recently hosted an MLB Cup for boys 11-12 and women 15 and under.
“According to ESPN, 1.6 million people followed the tournament, that’s a large number for a children’s tournament,” Fernández added.
Although Fernández agrees that the Clásico helped increase the popularity of the sport in Mexico, he says that the number of fans has already been growing steadily in recent years.
“Many Mexicans saw the team play in the World Classic and said ‘wow, we are the third best team in the world’ and now they are watching and paying more attention to the sport, but that does not mean that we are just a trend or that all things that we have done in seven years have had no effect,” added Fernández.
Mexico has hosted regular season series in the past. The first in August 1996 when the Padres faced the New York Mets, and then in May 2018 with the Padres playing the Los Angeles Dodgers while in 2019, the Cincinnati Reds played the St. Louis Cardinals and then the Astros faced the Dodgers, all of them in Monterrey, in the north of the country.
Mexico City was supposed to host a series between the Padres and the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2020, but it was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, MLB goes to the 2020 series that was supposed to host a series between the Padres and the Arizona Diamondbacks, but it was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
