In this episode of the Stratfor Podcast, we explore the geopolitics of baseball with Professors Tolga Ozyurtcu and Thomas Hunt from the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at The University of Texas at Austin, regular contributors to our series on the geopolitics of sports.
They’ll be joined by Stratfor Senior Analyst Matthew Bey as they discuss the global spread of the sport and the underlying stories from imperialist expansions to subtle resistance and the evolution of the game itself.
Transcript
Ben Sheen [00:00:10] Hello and thank you for joining us for this edition of the Stratfor podcast, focused on geopolitics and world affairs from Stratfor.com. I'm your host, Ben Sheen. Today we're talking about baseball, or more to the point the geopolitics of baseball. From imperialistic expansions to simple resistance including just how and why different coaches are driven to make an adopted sport their own. Today's conversation is part of our series of contributing perspectives on the geopolitics of sports. We'll be joined by Professors Thomas Hunt and Tolga Ozyurtcu from the Department of Kinesiology and Health Education at The University of Texas at Austin, both regular contributors to the topic on Stratfor Worldview. They'll also be joined by Stratfor Senior Global Analyst Matthew Bey. Thanks again for joining us on today's discussion on geopolitics of baseball. Well Thomas, Tolga, Matt, thanks for joining me today.
Thomas Hunt [00:01:06] Thanks for having us.
Ben Sheen [00:01:07] As any listener to this podcast should already know, we look at matters of geopolitics and global significance, a rather big part of that really is when we look at culture and how, certainly how cultures have evolved over time and the things that shaped them and a huge part of that is quite obviously sports and sporting events. Which have kind of occupied a place in our collective psyche that few other things can hold claim to. A question I guess I always have is how do certain sports come about? How do they spread and how do they gain this sort of cultural relevance? And certainly as we've talked about this, the group of us, baseball does rise to the fore so this seems like a good place to start off.
Thomas Hunt [00:01:43] Yeah absolutely, we kicked off this recent geopolitics of sports column with a look at how baseball got to Japan which I think many people including us as we look closer into the history of it are surprised at how relatively early that began, you know, within a decade or two of the game being formalized in the US and we tend to take such an American exceptionalist view of baseball as our own game and what I think is quite interesting is how quickly it spreads especially beyond Japan but through out the US sphere of influence in Latin and Central America. We were thinking that that might be kind of fun to take a little bit of a tour and take a look at who plays what and how they got there.
Ben Sheen [00:02:22] That sounds absolutely perfect and certainly one of the things I struggle with being an Englishman, is that we created all these sports like cricket and tennis, and now the entire world is better at them than we are. How do we really see the proliferation of baseball in the world?
Thomas Hunt [00:02:35] Somethings are perhaps, once you take a look at them, less surprising than you'd imagine. It tends to be that people take their games, and their food, and their culture and the things they do with them. When we look at sports in Latin America it's really to oversimplify things, that the team sport at the spectator sport level you've got baseball countries and you've got soccer countries and a couple hybrid countries and not to be crude but their history is essentially a game of which white man got there first and with their sports in tow, and Ben some of your country folk also got there but I think the class exemptions of cricket lead to the proliferation of football or soccer as opposed to cricket.
Tolga Ozyurtcu [00:03:16] And then also when the rejection of British colonials started much earlier than the rejection of other parts of colonials within Latin America and I think we also see that it's even longer with the spread of cricket for example, whether it's being so popular in India, South Africa places where colonialism lasted a much longer time for the Brits.
Thomas Hunt [00:03:31] Yeah absolutely.
Matthew Bey [00:03:32] There's also another colonial story here that is not British based but Spanish based, in the case of Cuba. I think there are all sorts of interesting imperial colonial dimensions to this.
Thomas Hunt [00:03:42] Yeah absolutely, and I think we'll end up circling back to Cuba because it is perhaps the most interesting and on the surface kind of head scratching case of an unparallel love for baseball with sort of an unparalleled historic at least symbolic distaste for everything else American. Baseball is our subject today given the sort of timing of the year, but it might make more sense almost to start with the soccering end of things and sort of work our way back to baseball. And this may be what most listeners are most kind of big sports fan are familiar with is that, no surprise, majority of Latin America especially South America is soccer land, or football land, not to offend some listeners. And those stories are surprisingly over, unsurprisingly pretty straight forward. You've got the Dutch in Paraguay in the late 1800's. You've got the Brit's throughout the continent again in the late 1800's. Specifically we can blame the Scott's for Brazil's success and dominance in the game, which may or may not be a claim to fame. But it kind of follows that trajectory throughout the continent especially in South America, In Peru you've got sort of a hybrid, Peruvian students coming back from studies in England but as well as English sailors in the Port of Kiyal which is a big Pacific sort of transition or meeting point for people and cultures. So soccer, football, takes route pretty heavily throughout that part of the globe by the turn of the 20th century and it doesn't, as we know, it doesn't ever really leave. The first World Cup is played in Uruguay in 1930,
Thomas Hunt [00:05:23] they win a couple of those before eventually coming back to some global success in this century. But maybe it makes sense to move from there to look at baseball.
Ben Sheen [00:05:32] And that's a question that I have. When do you put a sport that's a popular and family rooted as soccer obviously is in the Americas, how does baseball get a toehold?
Thomas Hunt [00:05:41] Well that's what's interesting and as we look it really just kind of appears to be that most of these situations were either or. There's an interesting mix of what you might call the hybrid countries and even baseball fans may be most surprised in Nicaragua and Panama, the national team sport is still considered to be baseball. And this holds mostly in both those countries to the early American influence, again all these things are happening around the same time, the late 1800's early 1900's. And those are really kind of entrenched there until the last couple generations. Baseball kind of goes out of flavor with the Nicaraguan civil wars, although it's made a bit of a come back. I think I was reading they've got a professional league since 2004 or 2005. But in both Nicaragua and Panama, soccer seems to really kind of take over by the end of the 20th century and we've seen that kind of backed up with their creeping success in CONCACAF World Cup qualifiers and regional tournaments and stuff. Those two countries present kind of an interesting hybrid as well as Mexico, which owing to proximity perhaps, not very surprising at all and in Mexico I think sometimes we forget that our neighbors of the south, it's a big country and it's got states and different, just like in the US, you've got football states and basketball states that there are actually states within Mexico, I think Oaxaca is one, where baseball is the clear, in way, big time team sport but over all it's very much a soccering nation.
Thomas Hunt [00:07:14] Which then I guess gets us to those oddballs you mentioned who plays baseball, and I think as big baseball fans will know from probably the players that have broken through over the years, you've got Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Cuba.
Matthew Bey [00:07:30] I mean Cuba, a lot of it, if you just go back through the history, a lot of it's also going into the Negro Leagues, Negro Leagues have their summer league there for example, or I think they still have winter league, so it was a very common connections within those kinds of societies as well to have a connection that was not just based in kind of the US zone of influence through I guess what you would say like US military power, US social power, things like that. But also just the other parts of the culture within the United States that we're able to connect into these societies. I think that's also what you have similar within the Dominican Republic for that matter and also the colonial architecture there is obviously a big part of it so one of the funny things that I've always found fascinating is that why is baseball so popular on one half of the Island of Dominica? And it was a lot of it because of people fleeing Cuba afterwards, but they couldn't really, you know, they didn't have the same kind of cultural connections to the Dominican Republic which is a different colony of Spanish just like Cuba was. So I think there was these weird dynamics that allowed it to proliferate throughout the Caribbean and if you actually look at the development of baseball in terms of the way they export players to the United States recently you've only recently had waves outside of Cuba. Cuba you had connections going back to the beginning of the 1900's, you didn't have baseball players coming from the Dominican Republic, or from Panama,
Matthew Bey [00:08:42] for the most part until the later half the 20th century. So I think that's an interesting parallel about just the way that its spreads throughout as opposed to just the colonial rejection of it I guess in some ways.
Thomas Hunt [00:08:54] No that's a great point and there is some evidence, I think in the Dominican Republic historically it was always sort of credit to US occupation essentially of the island in and during and post World War I years, but some historians have that there is evidence that Cubans actually had kind of cross pollinated and brought the game by end of the 19th century, and so it is interesting to think that by then you already have non-Americans spreading, quintessentially the American game, and like I said the Caribbean countries really do form a major core of the game both as sort of as baseball playing nations and also as contributors to the major leagues and sort of international competition now, and in all their cases, like Matt said, it's kind of a complex and multifaceted history, but the arrival generally kind of goes with American military or American business, the oil companies in Venezuela are sort of seen as the major driving force there. But I think it really all comes a head in Cuba.
Ben Sheen [00:09:57] And that's what's so curious to me, because when we look at these countries that they traditionally within the US sphere of influence, you know, Cuba falls within that, but that passed as certainly not, you know, they've had a fractious relationship with the United States and suddenly that's been a lot of communist influence there so, how does baseball have such a strong following in Cuba when it's kind of, this American associated sport? You'd think it would be rejected out right but that's certainly not the case is it?
Tolga Ozyurtcu [00:10:21] I think you have to move further back in history to understand Cuba. So baseball moved to Cuba in the mid 1800's and it was very much seen as an anti-Spanish sport so when Spain was in control, attendance at bull fighting matches was virtually mandatory and so the local Cuban population took up baseball as a statement against that. And so we look to the earlier period where America wasn't in charge to understand why baseball was so popular there. That lays the ground work, but how did that actually continue to be a theme, especially once the communist arrived?
Matthew Bey [00:11:02] You see over and over again in sports studies that local populations adopt the imperial power sport and then in a way uses it as a site of soft resistance. Just as in the case of Indian cricket against British cricket, we see the same sort of trend in Cuba where it was adopted, it was used for Cuba's own purposes and an independent type of Cuban baseball grew up as sort of a resistance mechanism to America.
Thomas Hunt [00:11:32] Yeah it's kind of another great example of our increasingly more nuance understanding of cultural globalization or localization as not just these sort of one way, top down, adoptions but these really kind of complex interpretations than remixes almost, where we kind of take something and make it our own. It's the beauty of our human ability to make sports mean something. At the end of the day whether it's in the US or in Cuba it's just some guy hitting a ball with a stick which can be a maddening process, and running in circles to the left, except in the Finnish version, that's a conversation for another day, but so yeah, I think it shows how that same game could be used first to sort of resist Spanish colonial identity, create something of a Cuban identity while also allowing it, at the same time to resist American influence by being a kind of point of confluence and a point of interaction with American businessmen and military and just the general American presence in the first half of the 20th century.
Matthew Bey [00:12:32] I'm thinking of a really good parallel to think about here though, is I think, over the last 20 to 30, 40 years, where we've seen baseball grow the most, like culturally, it's been in Japan along time but we seen it growing in Taiwan, we Seen it growing in South Korea, we've even seen it starting to grow in places like China. Is that maybe the next wave of rejectionalism of either the US or in this case possibly the US's closest ally in the region, Japan, within that same kind of a framework? If we go back through Japanese history, we do see for example, I believe Sadaharu was half Korean and that actually was a big cultural problem for them because he was half Korean, he was the biggest home run hitter of the time, so I'm wondering if we're not starting to see the groundwork for that within Asia, that we saw, you know, 50 years earlier in South America and Latin America.
Thomas Hunt [00:13:18] I think all these flows just sort of demonstrate the malleability of these things and our ability to sort of adapt things to our needs, because the games are fun on some primal level at they present challenge that's interesting and novel enough to pursue and I think that's why it eventually, in the Cuban scenario, it stuck. By the time they had revolutionary and other concerns they didn't really have time to figure out a game that necessarily went with it so it, they changed the interpretation of it, the deprofessionalized the league, became an amateur only league and it wasn't they were playing an American imported sport, the were playing Cuban baseball, and I think that still kind of, despite the changing times and the number of defecting players to play professionally in the US and eventually as relations change as the opening up of those professional relationships I still think there's essentially there's Cuban baseball that's different than American baseball.
Ben Sheen [00:14:15] We'll get to the second part of our conversation on the geopolitics of baseball in just one moment. But if you're interested in learning more about the connections between geopolitics and sports be sure to visit us at Worldview.Stratfor.com. Thomas Hunt and Tolga Ozyurtcu's regular commentaries on topic are available in the expanded Global Perspectives section on the website, from how Japan got baseball to the driver's behind international boating scandals, or the history of golf in the People's Republic of China, you'll find their insights along side those from thought leaders from across fields and industries. Now let's get back to our conversation with Thomas, Tolga, and Stratfor's Matthew Bey on the geopolitics of baseball. How have we seen these relationships develop over time because clearly there's this aspect of when you take something that is perhaps unfamiliar and you play with it enough that it becomes your own and then you imprint your own style on it and then you ironically can go back to influence the originator of the sport, so how have we seen these cycles play out certainly in the modern era?
Tolga Ozyurtcu [00:15:18] Well it's tough to watch baseball now without realizing that there is a huge Latin American influence that some of the greatest players in the world are coming from that region. And so the impact has been massive.
Matthew Bey [00:15:28] The other way I think you can kind of flip that around is you've also kind of seen the exodus of African American baseball players for example they've gone, you've seen the sports going in the inner cities it's not baseball like it might have been 50, 40, 60, years ago, it's now basketball, or something else or football, something like that so you're starting to see almost like a void that's filling up there with other players coming in, imported essentially to play and I think that's the other thing that's so striking when you watch baseball these days. And going back to your point about how the game can evolve to be structurally different, if you just look at and watch a game in Japan, or South Korea, you just see how it's a very different environment, you know, you have cheerleaders in some of the places in South Korea, you have a different style of game, it's not as much power pitching, throwing 100 miles an hour as much as it is finesse, you then can look at games when you're looking at, you got Cuban players or people in Latin America it's much more about having an aggressive style to the way that you play to a more measured style that you see in the United States which is just the different kinds of dynamics, it's kind of interesting to watch and when you actually import players into the United States from either the Japanese baseball leagues or the Cuban baseball leagues, you start to see those talent sets and the way that, not just the cultural aspects of you know having culture shock coming over here and playing
Matthew Bey [00:16:44] but also just the style it's very, very different so if you look at you know, a famous example of that is there's like the saying in the Dominican Republic, you don't get off the island by walking, you get off the island by hitting. That's kind of an explanation of why a lot of them are more aggressive swingers and if you look in Japan you have much more of a culture that's stylized towards split finger fastballs or fork ball, so you see in the US when those pitchers come over here they can dominate really quickly because American players really aren't used to seeing that kind of an arch of the pitch. There's all these kinds of different dynamics which are just fascinating, I mean, I'm not sure there's much of a reason of why they evolved that way but they just have because they've been operating in their own little boxes for so long.
Thomas Hunt [00:17:23] It's almost foolish to try to explain why these things evolve that way, what's amusing is when the sporting media, especially the American sporting media tries to explain these things, it inevitably falls to some kind of outmoded overly generalized cultural stereotypes, right, the Dominican players strike out because they're hot blooded Latins or whatever it is, and the Japanese are, if you hear Ichiro Suzuki described as meticulous one more time I'm going to lose my mind. But it kind of neglects that they're coming out of systems that play the game in fundamentally different way, which maybe to bounce back to soccer is something that, because the game has been so obviously global for so long that's not taken for granted. You still hear some of it, the methodical Germans, and the flashy Brazilians, but usually when we talk about international differences and styles of play in soccer it's grounded on an analysis on the development of their tactics and actual approaches of the game and not some sort of mythical it's in the blood, it's in the water sort of thing that still is overwhelmingly the diagnosis of baseball players making the transition.
Tolga Ozyurtcu [00:18:26] Even look in the United States style of baseball, how many evolutions has that gone through? I mean we have the dead ball era, which is an era where home runs weren't a big thing and then it goes immediately into an era where things adjust, they have a huge offense of explosion through home runs, Babe Ruth, et cetera, everybody knows that story, but then you go back into the 1960's you actually have a revolution back to pitching then it becomes more defense, speed oriented, and then we have the steroid era after that, and now we're back into this kind of dominant pitching environment which is kind of starting to have runs be more at a premium, strike outs are up, but home runs aren't down. You start to see, you've seen evolutions in every society's games and it's most, maybe most starkness, because we have as much of an awareness of it in the US style itself.
Thomas Hunt [00:19:08] That's so well put, we tend to really we have a really bad historical memory when it comes to the games. We know the version that we're most familiar with, that we're currently exposed to and we have a real nostalgic sort of white wash approach to the past and we don't realize, especially when rule changes are brought into play we all kind of, especially traditionalists seem to kind of really freak out and that happened this year with some changes to the timing of baseball games. But if you look back at the history of all these sports it's a constant push and pull, adjusting rules, adjusting styles of play, to try to kind of make sense of the best way to win, but also just the reflection of the times and the desires of spectators and players alike to kind of influence the game.
Matthew Bey [00:19:48] You bring this romanticism looking back at the glory days or the past and future of a sport or anything like that but I mean we can go back to the United States, I mean look at the golden era of baseball might be the 1950's for what people think of it. However if you go back to the golden era of societies or the golden era of countries you have those very similar dynamics coming through in geopolitics, I mean, Ben I'm sure you're well aware of the cultural stereotypes of the golden age of the British empire and I'm not from the UK so I can't really call it from my own perspectives but I mean it is something that you start to see just broadly speaking, it doesn't necessarily have to be in baseball or any other sport as much as you see within a societies own kind of view points of where their place is in the world.
Ben Sheen [00:20:32] Absolutely, there's always that tendency to look back with these rose tinted spectacles at the pinnacle of your career, or your society, or your culture, and it certainly seems that way with sports as well. You can perform, certainly at the microcosmic level you have a team that performs very well and suddenly has a drought for years where they simply under perform and it's a tough thing to reconcile I think, but it's a good way to bring it back around to the whole geopolitics angle and we see all these things play out really in sports and certainly in baseball and football as well.
Tolga Ozyurtcu [00:21:02] On that point about that geopolitics of soccer and baseball, I've got a good story from the Cold War that might bare mentioning. In 1970 the United States notice that, through photography, noticed that there's infrastructure being built on an island called Kyo Alcatraz off of major port in Cuba, and the analyst noticed that there were all sorts of soccer fields going into place and their was no baseball fields and so all of a sudden, Henry Kissinger goes to Bob Haldeman, Nixon's Chief of Staff and says, "Cubans play baseball, Russians play soccer" And the worry was that the Russians were putting back into place a military infrastructure in Cuba that had been taken off in 1962 as part of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and so there was a very real worry that this was a sign that the Soviets were building a naval base that submarines could be off the coast of America in much larger numbers and it was very alarming, but I think it says something about the geopolitics of sport, that sports fields were looked to as intelligence evidence.
Ben Sheen [00:22:10] Absolutely, we still see that today. We saw some satellite imagery of a recent country that, what looked like a nuclear site, it'd been abandoned for a long time and then all of a sudden we started seeing shadows from volleyball courts indicating that people were playing in and around the area and certainly once another infrastructure popped up as well. So these things are certainly good signifiers, and it's definitely a case of wherever deployments happen people will bring their pasttimes with them, and it's easier to see a soccer pitch, or a volleyball pitch from the sky than it is a chess board.
Tolga Ozyurtcu [00:22:43] Another thing that is kind of interesting, we just look at the recent history and the rise of league academy's, for example in baseball, these are really, really popular, so you see a lot of sports teams really starting with like the 19, I guess it would be 80's at this point, you would have the Chicago Cubs, or the Houston Astro's or some major league team establish a sports academy in order to get developing players in a Latin American country whether it be Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, as a way to get young people in those societies that were playing baseball in the streets into a more formalized culture, more formalized setting where they can actually start teaching them a much more I guess, standardized fundamentals in a more structured setting but that's how a lot of teams, for example, were able to mine, essentially for fantastic players and one of my favorite stories about this is how the Houston Astro's they were pretty famous for doing this, being the first kind of country, or the first academy's in Venezuela. So if we look through the 1990's and look at the growth of Venezuelan players coming over from Venezuela to the United States, it was almost always through the Houston Astro's academy, it would be players like Carlos Guillén, Freddy Garcia, and also Bobby Abreu, I mean we start to see teams, at the team level, always trying to get that edge and they play a role in this as well I think, and that's something else that is something worth considering, I mean I guess
Ben Sheen [00:23:58] we see this also in soccer when we talk about now teams going into different, going now, making connections to I guess the people in the middle east now for funding, the selling, so that's something that's unique now that I think we're moving into or obviously already moved into with baseball where it's not necessarily just going to be the government, the military, it's more going to be led by the teams in some ways.
Thomas Hunt [00:24:19] Very much reflects the sort of modern business of sport and I think the soccer parallel probably, developmental academies throughout Africa, as baseball has gone throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and I think the heart of this is the Dominican Republic where now all 30 major league teams have a developmental academy and these things, they're and interesting beast and they're sort of a double edged sword in some ways. On the one hand, if you look at major league baseball's numbers and perspective, they're pumping money into the economies there, they're creating jobs, they're stabilizing sort of the predatory agent based system where some guy would go and offer sort of bogus contracts to a bunch of kids in the hopes that one of them makes it. If you look at critics though, this is just a way to exploit cheap labor to kind of play on the dreams of these kids and I think like any sort of international labor situation, which is essentially what we're talking about, I think both sides have some truth to them. I think the governments of these countries have welcomed these development with open arms and baseball has improved markedly as a result, but to loop back to the playing styles thing, I think that's one of the things that does get lost here is that some of the more interesting and unique sort of cultural differences in how we play the game, we're going to see less and less of those as these professionals are coming out of these American influenced American coached approaches.
Thomas Hunt [00:25:46] It's not necessarily for better or worse, but it's just it is what it is. I think that there's no way to escape that, players want to make it to the big leagues, these teams want these players, and so the trade off is going to be the loss of some of that, strike out or home run sort of approach to the game and we're going to see maybe less variation between an American high school student and a Dominican 17 year old prospect. So I think this is kind of, it plays very interestingly and it definitely has, I think clear sort of connections to just the general flow of geopolitical labor and ideas.
Tolga Ozyurtcu [00:26:17] Yeah and also I mean, take an example of the Venezuela case, over the last 15 years we've seen Venezuela have this massive political shift going to the Chavistas and now in an economic crisis for the last two or three years, we've actually seen some of those academies start to close and we've seen a lot of the young Venezuelan's being signed by these contracts by major baseball teams they're not going to the Dominican or else where in Latin America for their academy training just because it's no longer as acceptable or as easy for a, the Houston Astros for example, to run and finance an operation in a country like Venezuela which is just going down into a bankrupt disaster with high inflation et cetera, and having a worse political relationship with the United States government. So we are starting to see the geopolitical impacts in those countries now feedback into the way that it's developing within baseball and within America's sphere of influence.
Thomas Hunt [00:27:07] And so yeah, looking forward I think tying all these different ideas together is sort of what comes next for the growth of the game and I think like we've seen in a variety of American professional leagues, major league baseball definitely has an eye on moving beyond just our borders, and we've heard rumbling of potential teams in Mexico, the return of Montreal, although I don't know, Matt have you heard will they be the Expos again or Le Expos.
Matthew Bey [00:27:32] I don't think they can be the Expos because the Expos are now The Nationals right?
Thomas Hunt [00:27:35] Yeah I don't know how, although in hockey there's been all these sort of weird.
Matthew Bey [00:27:39] Well we've seen hockey actually respark back into parts of Canada. Yeah, so we've also seen, the big one is obviously Havana, so if we're talking about the post-Fidel Castro, post-Raul Castro era, you taking hold the whole opening up of Cuba back to the United States now, maybe for the next four to eight years under President Donald Trump that may not happen as much as it might have under a different president but we might actually start to see a big push of trying to have major league baseball go back, or go into Havana, which would be actually a hugely shift one. We know that they're rabid fans for baseball now the question is can they do that quickly enough to sustain a major league team or not, I mean, Mexico City makes a lot more sense, possibly may be a city like Monterrey, but that's kind of the big shift that I Would expect to see over the next 10, 15, 20, 30 years, is this kind of internationalization not just of the academies or the expansion of baseball throughout these different sites, but just the expansion of baseball as a organized entity under MLB or maybe, who knows, 40 years down the road it wouldn't be crazy having a team coming up in Tokyo for example, I mean even the NFL we're seeing, is seeing, flirting with the idea of looking to play even more games, they already are in Europe for example. I think that's just an open question down the road and I think that we're going to see that it's just a matter of time.
Thomas Hunt [00:28:52] Yeah I absolutely agree and I think, and Matt's right, we don't know necessarily what the model will be, whether it'll be under the MLB umbrella but I think that another possibility would be something almost like we've seen in soccer's various champions leagues, you know Europe, UA for being the most famous one, but they also do it in Asia and even this side of the world in the CONCACAF, I think we could possibly see a non-National team, a professional champions league sort of thing where maybe in the MLB off season you would have the top MLB teams playing the top teams from Cuba, from Mexico, from wherever it was in sort of a tournament style, knock out style, and I think as soccer's influence has crept in North America, I think the taste for that sort of format is definitely picking up as well. That might be another way that we see this play out, and it would surely make things interesting.
Ben Sheen [00:29:40] As much as it seems that the rumors of baseball's demise have been greatly exaggerated, certainly the next few years we could potentially see a boom period as all these factors we talked about come into play and actually baseball becomes more popular than ever.
Thomas Hunt [00:29:53] No, I think that's a perfect way of putting it and this is something you know even in my lifetime every 10 years or so there's a threat to baseball, the strike, the steroid era, basketball, football, all these things, but just with this international growth and the sort of history we've traced where it seems to keep shaping as reshaping itself I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon.
Ben Sheen [00:30:11] Well that's very well put, and a good place to finish up. Tolga, Thomas, Matt, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Thomas Hunt [00:30:18] Thank you.
Tolga Ozyurtcu [00:30:18] Thank you.
Ben Sheen [00:30:26] That concludes this episode of the Stratfor podcast. If you enjoyed today's conversation or would like to learn more about the subtle and sometimes less than subtle connection between sports and geopolitics be sure to visit the global perspective section on worldview.stratfor.com. We'll also include some related links in the show notes. If you have a question or a comment about the podcast or even an idea for a future episode, let us know, you can call us at 1-512-744-4300 extension 3917, or reach us by email at podcast@stratfor.com, and don't forget to leave us a review. We really appreciate your feedback and your review also helps others discover the podcast, it just takes a few moments and you can leave your review on itunes or wherever you subscribe to the podcast. And for more geopolitical intelligence, analysis, and forecasting that brings global events into valuable perspective follow us in twitter @Stratfor. Thank for listening.
