Baseball is Truly International

As a baseball fan who grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts—just over twenty miles directly south of Fenway Park—I have more than a few fond memories connected to the Boston Red Sox. There was the 2004 World Series sweep of the Cardinals to end “the curse”; the three subsequent World Series championships that killed that term forever; Pedro Martinez’s masterful performance in the 1999 All-Star game (and Tim Wakefield’s unfortunate stint on the bench ten years later); and Roger Clemens striking out twenty Mariners in nine innings. I was also deep in the right field stands on September 21, 2006, when David “Big Papi” Ortiz launched his fifty-first homerun of the season against Johan Santana, breaking Jimmy Foxx’s sixty-eight-year record. (I suspect we all thought it was hit straight at us, even though it landed several rows down from my location.)

However, I have not lived in Massachusetts for twenty years, and have not lived in New England for thirteen years. And while my home in Potsdam, New York, isn’t terribly far from Boston—I last attended a game at Fenway in May 2019 with one of my best friends—my home on the border with Canada puts me much closer to another stadium, another team, and another wonderful baseball community: Ottawa and their former Can-Am League team the Champions. The team played in Raymond Chabot Grant Thorton (RCGT) Park. Over the past several years now, I have regularly made the short drive into Ottawa for a variety of reasons: wonderful people, fantastic food, a vibrant arts culture, and—until recently—live, professional baseball.

Unfortunately, I need to use the past tense because the Champions are currently a team without a league. After the merger of the Can-Am and Frontier Leagues in 2020, Ottawa’s professional baseball team was not included on the new league’s 2020 schedule (and this was before the lockdowns related to COVID-19). However, baseball fans have long adopted the mentality that “there’s always next year,” and fans of Ottawa’s professional baseball team remain hopeful for a future that includes baseball. And just as importantly, Ottawa is a city that deserves a professional baseball team, in part because of its history as a bi-lingual, multi-cultural national capital city whose team and whose fans have wholeheartedly adopted baseball’s international appeal.

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Originally opened in 1993 as JetForm Park—home to the International League Ottawa Lynx—RCGT Park became the home to the Ottawa Champions in 2014, with the team debuting against the Sussex Country Miners on May 22, 2015. The Ottawa Lynx were a minor league affiliate of the Montréal Expos (1993–2002), the Baltimore Orioles (2003–2006), and the Philadelphia Phillies (2007). My first game was later that season, in the company of a woman who, having grown up a baseball fan in Ottawa, was more than happy to tell me about the park and the team, as well as instruct me on the finer points of keeping a baseball score sheet (and what makes for a well-designed sheet for keeping score). And while I only became marginally better at keeping a proper score sheet over the years, my appreciation for the Ottawa Champions as a microcosm of some of baseball’s better traits certainly grew over time.

As an American watching my “national pastime” in a foreign (albeit very familiar) country, I was immediately reminded of baseball’s truly international nature. However, I’m not trying to suggest that Ottawa is alone in this regard. Professional baseball teams have long been home to players from throughout the Americas as well as several Asian and European nations. And in 2017, the South African middle infielder Mpho’ Gift Ngoepe became the first player from continental Africa to play in the MLB when he debuted for the Pittsburgh Pirates against the Chicago Cubs on April 26, 2017 (and recording his first hit against former Red Sox lefty Jon Lester). His MLB debut also coincided with Freedom Day, the South African holiday celebrating the 1994 election for which Black...