So the Perth Heat/ABL today announced some groundbreaking news - that the Heat, as ABL champions, will participate in the Asia Series baseball tournament in November. Until today, I had never heard of the Asia Series, so initially didn't really understand what this actually meant. Turns out it is a relatively small tournament, which is quite young. It seems that there has been very little media or other interest in the story today. So why bother? Well, after reading about it some more - I think that the main strategy here must be to increase the exposure of the ABL in Asia - there doesn't seem to any other benefit.
It turns out that the Asia Baseball series has been around since 2005 - according to Wikipedia. And when i say it has been around since 2005, I mean there were four tournaments held between 2005 and 2008, with no tournament since then because it lost financial backing. The tournaments have involved teams from the Korean and Japanese leagues as well as teams from China and Taiwan. Predictably, the Japanese teams have won each of the four previous tournaments.
The ABL touted that the Asia League is a 'prestigious' event which will attract 5 million TV viewers. Having absolutely no idea about the level of prestige held for the league in Asia, it's hard to say whether this is true or not. What you can say is that there was practically ZERO media interest in the story. A google news search shows just one article, this one from Taiwan. I imagine there may have been some more coverage in say Japan or Korea, but certainly looks like there was very little interest here. Even twitter was rather quiet. This suggests that there is not a great deal of interest at home, which is probably not much of a surprise. It was hard enough for the ABL to generate any mainstream media interest in the home league, so generating interest in a small, unheard of tournament many thousands of miles away is unlikely be simple.
However, lack of media attention or public interest does not necessarily mean this is a bad idea. It was apparent during the course of the ABL Season that there was plenty of Asian interest in our league. This came both from Asian players and fans. Getting the premier team from the ABL facing off against top Asian teams will potentially lead to even greater interest in the league from our Pacific neighbors, which could lead to more support - both financially and through the fan base.
I don't expect there will be much local interest in the tournament - although I would be happy to be wrong about this - but I think it is a smart, but maybe premature, strategy for developing our league.
What do you think?
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