Emerging like a mirage in the desert outskirts of Dubai, a sight unfamiliar to those in the Middle East and Asia has risen up like a dream in the exact dimensions of the field at Yankee Stadium in New York.
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 will begin Friday at the new Barry Larkin Field, artificially turfed for the broiling sun of the United Arab Emirates and named for an investor who is a former Cincinnati Reds shortstop.
The professional league seeks to draw on the sporting rivalry between India and Pakistan with two of its teams, as the Mumbai Cobras on Friday will face 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 its own 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 got to learn the rules anyway so we’re like 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
All the games in the season, which ends mid-December, will be played at Baseball United’s stadium out in the reaches of Dubai’s desert 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 alcohol and wearing costumes.
As journalists met Baseball United officials on Thursday, two fighter jets and a military cargo plane came in for landings at the nearby Al Minhad Air Base, flying over a landfill.
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 decided to go 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.
There will be four teams competing in the inaugural season. Joining the Cobras and the Monarchs will be the Arabia Wolves, Dubai’s team, and the Mideast Falcons of Abu Dhabi.
There are changes to the traditional game in Baseball United, putting a different spin on the game similar to how the Twenty20 format drastically sped up traditional cricket. The baseball league has introduced a golden “moneyball,” which gives managers three chances in a game to use at bat to double the runs scored off a home run.
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. A group of American supporters launched the professional Israel Baseball League in 2007, comprised almost entirely of foreign players. However, it folded after just 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 in the past.
But soccer remains a favorite in the Mideast, which hosted the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Then there’s cricket, which remains a passion in both India and Pakistan. The International Cricket Council, the world’s governing body for the sport, 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.
—Jon Gambrell, Associated Press