What else could Chelsea's owner swap between baseball and soccer?

Perhaps a better way to assess Chelsea owner Todd Boehly's all-star game suggestion is through the lens of other potential baseball-soccer crossovers.

Todd Boehly’s suggestion of an all-star game for English football united fans and pundits in a quest for the most substance-free argument for or against. British Chelsea fans and American Premier League fans took to their crosses in Boehly’s defense, saying “They hate this because we’re Blue” or “They hate this because he and his idea are red, white and blue,” respectively. Sadly, they weren’t wrong. Many of Boehly’s critics interrogated Boehly’s statements just far enough to conclude “Another money grab by Chel$ki” (and, unlike the last 20 years, the US dollar sign at least makes sense) or “We need to keep Americans out of the sport.” To give Gary Neville a benefit of the doubt, if all you knew of American ownership were the Glazers and you’re commenting in the week after the Queen’s death, we can understand the Crown & Country nationalism against the Colonies.

The more analytical neutrals in sports media or sports business did not contribute much more to the conversation. They, like the partisans, failed to offer any arguments for why a English Football League North vs. South All-Star Game might succeed or fail on its own merits.

Imagine, instead, that the idea came from a propa English owner of a club with some semblance of a history. Or, better yet, entered via a Satoshi-like white paper, free of any flag or faction, to achieve Boehly’s (and others’) stated goal of generating more money for teams down the English pyramid. How would people assess the viability of an all-star game under those conditions?

Rather than go through a few thousand words of pros, cons, yes-with-an-if and no-with-a-but, I’ll offer a framework and then some hypotheticals / counterfactuals that you and my other reader can hash out in the comments or wherever else.

Todd Boehly did not suggest an innovation, nor did he call on English football to study the problem and develop courses of action. He suggested something that works well in most North American sports, and used its broad North American success to assume success in England.

The question Boehly begged wasn’t “Can this work?” but “Can this work (a) here, (b) too?”

The appropriate framework, then, is not market fit for an innovative product but new market entry for an established product. Or graft vs. host, if you prefer.

So let’s warm up for this conversation with a few other ideas that Boehly could transplant between his two sports, baseball and soccer / football. How we approach those can help us identify the parameters for a less reflexively partisan perspective on the North vs. South All-Star Game.

Bring bookings to baseball

Baseball umpires will issue warnings to players (usually the pitchers) and managers, and occasionally eject a player or manager. But there is no objective criteria nor record of those events during the game or across a season. Introducing yellow and red cards will let umpires better control a game, let teams and leagues do a more thorough job tracking infractions and discipline issues, and give baseball fans one more stat to obsess over (better than launch angle, right?).

If a pitcher beans a batter, the umpire can decide whether it was intentional or not, and issue either a verbal warning or a yellow. Similarly, if a pitcher’s chin music starts getting a little too close and a little too persistent, that, too, could be a yellow. If the plunking happened immediately after a home run or to the same player twice in one game, the umpire may give a red card if he determines it was retaliatory or with attempt to harm.

And in the interest of cultural exchange, English football referees can start doing a baseball umpire’s lean back, spin the arm and over-the-top “yer outta here!” motion upon showing a red.

Mike Dean would approve.

Managers wearing kits with numbers

Not every football manager looks as suave in a suit as Jose Mourinho did in his first stint at Chelsea, nor as dapper as Alan Pardew did during his unfortunate trip into meme immortality. No wonder he then leaned into the multiply-unbuttoned button-down shirt look. Standard suits were standard fare (along with Nando’s and a pint of wine) for Sam Allardyce, while former banker Maurizio Sarri swore off suits in favor of maternity wear during his time at Stamford Bridge.

Gareth Southgate was only person in the entire sports industry to make a vest look as good on the sidelines as I once did. And then there are the assorted track suits, jardigans, polos and windbreakers.

Let’s bring some order to the chaos and better integrate the managers with their teams in the short time they have together by importing to football the baseball tradition of managers and coaches wear full team uniforms, complete with their own number. Football can reserve #1-23 for players, or limit staff to #60 and above, just to eliminate risk of conflict. Or it can be another front in the battle of managerial wills and player power.

Mourinho would likely choose the number of titles he’s won in whatever league he’s coaching in, or maybe his lifetime number of European cups.

And we know Pep likes the number 2, but will Kyle Walker give it up or will Pep have to wait until there’s turnover at right back?

Why wait 7 innings to sing?

Baseball can be a bit boring. Sometimes at games the most engaged fans are the ones who record every action in an old school scorebook. Why not give the fans something to do other than zone out or scroll through their phone?

We know baseball fans like to sing. During the seventh inning stretch at games of all levels, fans sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” increasingly “God Bless America,” and local faves like “Sweet Caroline” or “Oklahoma!”

So, why not spend all nine innings singing, like football fans do throughout Europe?

The Abner Doubleday Cup

Baseball and hockey are the only two North American sports that have sufficient depth and organization of leagues to constitute a sporting pyramid. No sport in the US romanticizes small town, lower tier, love-of-the-game-as-it-once-was-and-should-still-be quite like baseball. Single-A and Double-A ballparks in the Midwest live the Magic of the Cup 60 nights each summer.

Culturally and structurally, baseball is primed for a cup tournament. Change my mind.

Cover photo: Al_HikesAZ / Flickr, under CC BY-NC 2.0.