by Amaury Pi Gonzalez

PHOENIX–The season opened last week in Sydney Australia with the L.A. Dodgers and the Arizona Diamondbacks and the other 28 teams will open the season on March 31st so the show is ready to go. Under this Commissioner Bud Selig he would like to continue opening up the season overseas because it’s big money internationally.

Soccer is the most international sport there is but baseball has made great strides they opened outside of the U.S. starting in 1999 in Puerto Rico, they opened in Tokyo, Mexico City, and now they opened in Sydney. This is a good thing that their trying to do. The only thing I disagree with is that they should not open the season outside the United States.

Baseball is truly an American sport, not to dicriminate and I’m very sure of this, I remember when the first game of the season was opened up in Cincinnati because the Cincinnati Red Legs were the oldest team in professional baseball. I agree with playing abroad but opening night or opening day should be in the U.S.

However nobody has a say in that except the commissioner of baseball, so there you are MLB opened in Sydney and the Dodgers love Australia and they swept the Diamondbacks in two games. The strange thing about this is nobody saw this game in the L.A. market and your talking about 12-13 million fans between L.A. County and San Bernardino and all those communities there.

It’s ridiculous the game was played between 1:00 AM in the morning and four in the morning in the middle of the night. Nobody in the nation’s second largest market for television watched the season opener live. Its sad for TV ratings but it’s a couple of days for the two game series.

They can live with it but still but you won’t be able to see the game in this country when you put a game on in the middle of the night. I can understand if it was the FIFA World Cup and they’re playing in Rio in Brazil at 1PM and in San Francisco it’s 6PM. That’s the World Cup and that happens every four years but were talking about MLB the real league schedule.

There’s 162 games with 30 teams from April to September in a regular season schedule for a season and you have more consideration for the fan because in the end it’s the fans who watch TV and watch the sponsors and it’s the fans who go to the park. To open the season when most people are sleeping and most people go to work in the morning what can I say it’s stupid.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish TV voice for Angels baseball and does News and Commentary for Sportstalk radio