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LONDON — A trip to Mexico six years ago unexpectedly changed the direction of Mike Ivory’s sports fandom.
Four days into a vacation with his wife, Ivory stopped in to the sports bar in their hotel, where he saw a baseball game playing on the TVs. The England native was surrounded by Chicago Cubs fans in the bar and started talking with those seated around him as they watched the game, learning about the history of the franchise.
“I was hooked,” Ivory told the Tribune. “I watched a lot of baseball throughout that whole holiday, but it was really the Cubs that I kept going back to to look at the scores.”
When Ivory returned to the United Kingdom, he figured other baseball fans must be out there despite the sport’s low popularity in the country. So Ivory started a Twitter account (@ChicagoCubsUK) to connect with other baseball lovers in both his native country and the U.S. — and more specifically, Cubs fans.
Ivory, 31, saw the engagement grow after the inaugural London Series in 2019 with the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. He brought on his friend Joe Francis, who followed Ivory’s Twitter account and often engaged with it, to help grow the account to reach more UK Cubs fans. Because Francis worked at a bar, often getting home around 5 a.m., he still would be up when Cubs night games wrapped up.
The pandemic created lots of downtime in 2020, and for Rachel Marsh, 26, a video call that year with her Cubs-loving friend in Illinois created the perfect storm. The Cubs’ shortened season was underway when, during one of their chats, her friend directed her phone toward the TV to show Marsh a game and explain the sport and team.
“I was getting annoyed having to look at two screens, so I found a stream, put it on and I’ve barely missed a game since,” Marsh told the Tribune. “I chose the Cubs in that moment, and here we are.”
Marsh always had been a big sports fan. She grew up watching cricket and saw similarities to baseball — or, as she put it, “cricket on steroids,” adding with a laugh that her comparison “could trigger some people with the pun there.”
“I like how it is drawn out, I like that it takes time,” Marsh explained. “I like that it’s not just hit the thing as hard as you can and you’ve won the game, that it’s mental and physical. I love how many games there are. I love that it just completely takes over everything.”
Ivory and Francis eventually invited Marsh to help run their UK Cubs fan account when they saw her knowledge and engagement. Sadly, Francis unexpectedly died last year. Ivory and Marsh remain close to his mom and see her regularly.
For Ivory, Marsh and other devoted UK baseball fans, the Cubs playing in the London Series last weekend felt like a holiday. A chance to see their favorite team in person in their home country represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a sentiment echoed by Cubs fans who traveled from the U.S.
Ivory and Marsh attended both games at London Stadium, where the Cubs split the two-game series against the St. Louis Cardinals.
“I really hope this does have a lot of positive impact on getting people to be Cubs fans,” Ivory said. “I reckon MLB is where the NFL in the UK was maybe 20 years ago. We seem to be at the very start.”
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Major League Baseball identified London and the UK as an important avenue to build its brand overseas and specifically in Europe. MLB pays attention to where other American sports leagues have chosen to play international games.
Since 2007, the NFL has played a game in London every season except 2020, including multiple games per season since 2013 with three more scheduled this year. The Bears played in London in 2011 and 2019.
“Number one, London is a great sports town, and because there’s sort of a natural affinity for sport here in London, it’s a great place to gain a foothold into Europe,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said Friday. “Secondly, just for historical reasons, there’s a special affinity between Great Britain and the United States. We understand baseball as a uniquely American phenomenon in some ways. But if you’re trying to internationalize, starting in friendly territory seems like a good plan.”
The Cubs-Cardinals series drew 110,227 fans for the two games, nearly 8,500 fewer than the inaugural Yankees-Red Sox series.
“The bad things caused by the pandemic is a very long list,” Manfred said, “but one of the things I regret is that we weren’t able to build immediately on the momentum that we felt we gained from the Yankees-Red Sox series here. It was a really popular event. Great games. Economics were really strong in terms of merchandise sales.
“But it is a fact of life that the pandemic caused delays on a variety of fronts, and we feel like bringing another rivalry here and making a commitment to come back next year (with the New York Mets and Philadelphia Phillies) will allow us to regain the momentum that we might have lost.”
Said Ivory: “Between 2017 and 2023, the UK is completely unrecognizable now when it comes to baseball. We’ve got so many accounts now that are doing so many good things to promote the game that it’s just going to go from strength to strength, and I’m just excited to be part of where we’re going.”
