Bartolo Colon, Robinson Cano And Other Ex-MLBers Have Joined A Middle East Baseball League
Nothing says draft pick like a 50 year old man. The only thing weirder would be a guy in his 40's doing Barstool Idol. But I will say this tweet had me intrigued. It was just last month that the Mets had a big ceremony at Citi Field for Colon's retirement. Now he was joining some league I've never even heard of?
Looking into it, I guess this league is called Baseball United and they declare themselves as "the first-ever professional baseball league created to serve the Middle East and South Asia".
There are some pretty big names involved. Look at these draft results.
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Robinson Cano. Pablo Sandoval. Andrelton Simmons. Didi Gregorius. Those are established major leaguers who have been pretty successful. Not only that but Hall of Famers Mariano Rivera and Barry Larkin are stakeholders in the league itself and one of the teams (Karachi Monarchs...the team that drafted Colon) has Adrian Beltre as the GM and former MVP Miguel Tejeda as the manager. So what the Hell is this all about?
Baseball United will have 4 teams in the initial season located in Abu Dahbi, Dubai, Karachi and Mumbai. They plan to start playing in late November. This young lady seems excited about it.
They have plans for the future too. They want to expand to eight teams next year and I guess many of the rules in this league will be tailored to crowds that are used to watching cricket. I've have not watched much cricket but I've been told it is similar to baseball and would be a sport I'd really enjoy. If you are a big cricket fan, say in the comments what aspects you think would work with baseball.
I can't imagine they'll change baseball too much just because so many of the players are guys who were at the highest level. You have some guys on these teams like Sandoval who won three World Series and Andrelton Simmons who won four Gold Gloves. I'm guessing it'll be pretty similar to traditional baseball.
I think all of this sounds like a good thing for the sport. You have a number of the bigger names in baseball over the past 30 years involved in some capacity. They say their mission is to "inspire one billion new fans to fall in love with baseball". That sounds pretty great to me.