Smart Ball: Marketing the Myth and Managing the Reality of Major League Baseball

HOME PLATE: BASEBALL AS A GLOBAL BUSINESS: BALANCING POWER

104 HOME PLATE BASEBALL AS A GLOBAL BUSINESS: BALANCING POWER Entertainment—not autos, not steel, not financial services— is fast becoming the driving wheel of the new world economy. —MICHAEL J. WOLF This chapter concludes the progressive synthesis of baseball, viewed through MLB, as sport, domestic monopoly, neocolonial power, and global business. Each of those elements is an important part of MLB and is represented in the World Baseball Classic (WBC), an international showcase competition initiated by MLB and MLBPA in 2006 and cosponsored by league organizations of the fifteen other participating countries.A complementary event and emerging counterpoint to the WBC was the Summer Olympics,which terminated baseball participation after the 2008 Beijing games. These events provide insight into MLB’s opportunities and challenges in the global arenas. The WBC’s continuing success and expansion and the resumption of Olympic baseball are critical factors for MLB’s global business success. Discussion of the WBC and the Olympics follows an analysis of MLB’s international strategic and operational activity. GLOBALIZATION Recent actions by both MLB and individual teams suggest an organizational shift from a neocolonial to a multinational and multiracial business strategy in BASEBALL AS A GLOBAL BUSINESS: BALANCING POWER 105 a global economy. Joseph S. Nye Jr. defines globalization as “the growth of networks of worldwide interdependence.” American studies scholar Michael Denning notes that the term globalization was first used in 1961 and first included in a book title in 1988. He asserts that the concept, marked by the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, redefines modernity and signals the end of the three separate historical culture “worlds”—capitalism, communism, and decolonizing— that were the post–World War II international influences. In Denning’s view, the nation-state no longer is the central actor in the new consumption world that features global flows of commodities and communication.1 As both U.S. and MLB international experiences indicate, however, nationalism seems to be a significant resistant response to globalization, as it has been to neocolonialism. Walter LaFeber observes that the U.S. multinational corporation (MNC) first emerged in the late nineteenth century to dominate the world market in such commodities as oil (Standard Oil), film (Eastman Kodak), and sewing machines (Singer). Modern MNCs differ from their predecessors in at least five respects: they produce abroad rather than at home, they trade in knowledge and innovation rather than natural resources or industrial products, they depend increasingly on world markets for profit, they require massive advertising to sell product, and they are less accountable to the U.S. government. Nevertheless, modern MNCs follow earlier corporations’ lead in seeking to develop foreign revenues well in excess of their domestic business.2 While MLB is increasing its international focus, it does not fully conform to that description of a modern MNC. For the foreseeable future, MLB’s domestic business will far outweigh its foreign activity despite relative growth abroad. Its products (MLB players and games) are still produced primarily at home, although its global production objective is to secure more potential MLB players abroad and promote international competition. While baseball could be considered an innovation in some foreign countries, it is an old, traditional game that lacks the technological cachet of many MNC products.While MLB’s overall profit is just becoming influenced by its growing international revenues, they remain small compared to the domestic portion. As with other consumer businesses in the world entertainment economy, baseball does and will require significant advertising and celebrity endorsement to sell the game.Therefore,the emergence of foreign superstars such as Ichiro Suzuki of Japan or Chien-Ming Wang of Taiwan will be critical to global success.A country’s interest in baseball receives significant impetus if a native succeeds in MLB,a process that reinforces Michael J. Wolf ’s thesis regarding celebrity currency. MLB’s accountability to the U.S. government is unique because of the sport’s monopoly status, but as the steroid issue has indicated, government can 106 BASEBALL AS A GLOBAL BUSINESS: BALANCING POWER play a significant role if it chooses to do so. Therefore, MLB is not yet an MNC but is simply trying to develop a fledgling international business. Rather than aspiring to become a typical MNC, MLB seeks to become a smart power leader in developing and influencing an increasing network of national affiliations...