By Alan Klein

Like most institutions today, Major League Baseball—the organization that oversees North America's two top professional baseball leagues, the American League and the National League—is busy reconfiguring itself as a global entity.

But what, precisely, does this effort portend? Will we soon enjoy the multicultural pageantry of a real World Series? Are productive international partnerships being forged? Or is Major League Baseball (MLB) simply trying to colonize the rest of the baseball world?

I've been studying baseball's international reach for the better part of two decades. My 1991 book, Sugarball: The American Game, the Dominican Dream, examined the sport's impact on the culture and economy of the Dominican Republic. Six years of firsthand research in eight countries led to my latest book, Growing the Game: Major League Baseball and Globalization (Yale University Press, in press).

Though "globalization" is something of a catchall term, used in various ways by culture vultures, researchers, policymakers, and corporate executives, virtually everyone agrees on its effect—a radical compression of space and time.

The capacity to cross the globe in real time, with almost unimagined speed, has depended on two advances: a technological revolution in information sharing and an opening up of political channels. A photo in a book by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who's written extensively on globalization, captures the concept perfectly. Deep in prayer, an orthodox Jew presses his cell phone against Jerusalem's Wailing Wall, so a relative in Paris can gain the blessings offered to pilgrims who worship at the sacred place.

Are these interconnections good for the world? Or do they merely widen the gap between the rich and the poor? Studying MLB, I've found, offers the chance to study some of globalization's consequences in microcosm.

Consider the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Kansas City Royals, teams at opposite ends of the MLB economic spectrum. The former, which operates in the second-largest U.S. market, pioneered international baseball. The first megastars from Mexico (Fernando Valenzuela) and Japan (Hideo Nomo) came to the United States through the Dodgers, where they electrified fans everywhere. Sizable sums were required to dislodge both from their original Mexican and Japanese home teams.

Japan remains the single most expensive foreign free-agent market, in large part because the Japanese are so reluctant to lose their national heroes. On a visit to watch the Yomiuri Giants play at the Tokyo Dome, I listened to the reporters around me talk about the fears gripping this nation of baseball fanatics. Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui had already left for greener American pastures. Would Japan's professional league be further weakened by defections? Would MLB march across the international landscape, trampling everyone in its path?

Small-market teams like the Royals can't begin to even bid on Japanese superstars. So they go to the margins—in the Royals' case, to South Africa. South Africa has virtually no baseball history, but the game is quickly gaining popularity among its schoolchildren. The Royals are betting they can turn good athletes into reasonable prospects. Though this speculation carries risks, the costs of such low-end talent are manageable. To date, the Royals have signed five South African players.

Sitting atop the MLB organization, the Commissioner's Office eagerly looks for new opportunities to generate revenue abroad. Major League Baseball International (MLBI) is the branch that oversees these efforts, selling broadcast rights, corporate sponsorships, licensed products, and special events around the world.

As the game's biggest stars emerge from Tokyo, Santo Domingo, and Caracas, such sales are getting easier to make. MLBI recently signed a record $275 million deal with Japan's Dentsu Communications to give it TV broadcast rights to MLB games. Japanese fans now watch the New York Yankees (with Matsui in the outfield) nearly as avidly as they watch their beloved Yomiuri Giants, whose ratings have slipped badly over the past few years.

But MLB hasn't found success in all the international locations I studied. Baseball is still a niche sport in Europe, though it's been played there for more than a century. At the 2001 European Championship finals in Bonn, Germany, only a few hundred people watched from the stands; most were relatives or friends of those on the field.

In Italy, I asked some pros playing for the Bologna team whether there was anything distinctly Italian about baseball. They quickly noted that Italian fans are loud and passionate about the game. But, one player added, the fans don't actually know that much about baseball. So why do they come? "It's the lights. I think the lights attract them," he concluded.

Fortunately for those who show up, Italian teams play some of the best baseball in Europe. By comparison, the United Kingdom can barely field a national team, relying heavily on Canadian players, along with the occasional Australian.

To market the game worldwide, MLBI is busily attempting to teach it to school-age children in a wide range of countries. It's also giving accelerated instruction to the world's best players. If MLB could get one or two players from, say, Germany to the majors, it would galvanize that country's interest in baseball, much the way Yao Ming's entry into the NBA got millions of Chinese fans hooked on basketball.

Clearly, MLB has gone global in a multitude of ways. Driving Venezuela's highland roads in search of the next great pitching star. Negotiating with Korean television networks. Launching an MLB apparel store in Berlin. Establishing a league for twelve-year-olds in Cape Town.

Its methods are creative. And also, I discovered, very necessary. I was surprised to learn how much MLB is depending on globalization to stave off age and decay. The American and National Leagues can no longer reproduce their player base domestically. Their fan base is rapidly aging, too. Though these trends apply to other sports as well, they're more accelerated for baseball.

The health of the game depends on foreign growth. This year, 29 percent of all Major Leaguers come from countries other than the United States, a figure that has risen dramatically over the past decade. Foreign revenue now contributes more than 10 percent of MLB's annual total.

But as MLB expands beyond American borders, is it becoming a more democratic and decentralized organization? Or is it just running an increasingly international enterprise out of the United States?

For now, the evidence points toward the latter. The highly anticipated World Cup—style baseball tournament slated for next March is a case in point. Advance descriptions indicated it would be organized like a World Cup soccer event, with countries participating in the planning and the profit-sharing as equals. In reality, the tournament is being owned and operated by MLB, primarily for MLB. The heavy-handed control has so put off the Japanese and the Koreans, they have threatened to pull out of the competition altogether.

Similar complications would surround any move by MLB to develop franchises outside North America, a step many think the organization may take in the not-so-distant future.

Thorny obstacles are slowing baseball's quest for international growth. The sport still isn't well developed in many countries. The countries in which it has the strongest foothold tend to have the poorest economies. And too many industry leaders lack a truly global vision, one emphasizing collaboration over domination.

As a result, the world won't get a bona fide World Series anytime soon.

Alan Klein is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.