Consider: Tokyo and L.A. as Hometowns

BERKELEY — Brooklyn wants the Dodgers back. They won’t get them, but Hong Kong or Tokyo might.

When the Brooklyn Dodgers (and New York Giants) moved to the West Coast in 1958, major-league baseball became, for the first time, a truly national business. Now, nearly four decades later, the sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers could herald the transformation of professional baseball into a global enterprise.

Walter O’Malley transplanted his team to Los Angeles because he understood, sooner and more clearly than his contemporaries, that the business of baseball was being revolutionized. The market--middle-class America--was moving from the cities to the suburbs, and from east to west. Moreover, the advent of television and coast-to-coast air travel greatly reduced the obstacles to nationwide competition. Peter O’Malley’s decision to sell the Dodgers may ultimately prove to be as prophetic as his father’s.

The Dodgers are profitable and almost certainly the best-run and most civic-minded sports organization today. But, regrettably, that isn’t enough. To compete in the next century, professional teams will have no choice but to transform themselves into integrated global, entertainment and marketing operations. And, as the Dodgers’ president apparently understands, that will require far more capital and managerial capacity than future generations of O’Malleys will be able to muster.

Baseball is being transformed by two closely related phenomena: a media revolution that is erasing the traditional divides among different media--print, broadcast and cable--and blurring the distinctions among news, sports and entertainment, and the globalization of the sports marketplace, which is forcing franchises to compete for consumers, fans and players around the world.

The media revolution has spawned a vast array of outlets for sports programming. Besides the traditional broadcast networks, these include cable and satellite networks and, coming soon, live broadcasts over the World Wide Web. In addition, on-line demand for sports news and features seems nearly insatiable. This proliferation of outlets has greatly increased competition for content and programming.

In the old days, the divide between sports teams and media companies was relatively sharp. Even when a media company did own a team, as in the case of the New York Yankees and CBS, they were run as separate businesses. Today, media conglomerates see ownership of a sports team as a integral part of their overall operation. The most pointed example of this development was Ted Turner’s use of his Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks as regular programming for his cable network.

The value of sports franchises has correspondingly risen. But the ability of a company to realize this new-found value is quite different for a stand-alone, baseball-only business, like the Dodgers, and a large, integrated, global media company. Because of their diverse range of operations and virtually limitless access to capital, a Disney or a Time Warner, which now owns the Braves and Hawks, can exploit synergies unavailable to family-run franchises. This explains why so many professional franchises are now owned by media giants. It is also a reason why media magnate Rupert Murdoch is among the leading candidates to buy the Dodgers.

In addition, the emergence of a truly global sports marketplace is changing professional sports. Over the past decade, international broadcasts of U.S. professional sports have increased dramatically. It is now possible to see major league baseball, the NBA, the NFL and the NHL on television in most countries around the world. The growth of overseas broadcasting has gone hand-in-hand with efforts to market licensed products.

These global markets will provide the fastest-growing sources of new revenues for professional sports, and they will require franchises to reorient their operations.

Another force contributing to the globalization of professional sports is the growing importance of foreign players. Baseball has long recruited in Central America and the Caribbean, but it is now reaching into Asia and Europe to find new talent, always a key to success on the field. For example, much of the Dodgers’ success over the past half-century is due to its ability to recruit African American players like Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, Latino players like Pedro Guerrero and Fernando Valenzuela and now Asian players like Hideo Nomo and Chan Ho Park. But running global scouting and development programs is neither cheap nor easy, especially as more and more teams begin to follow the Dodgers’ lead.

Paradoxically, Peter O’Malley is probably the most globally minded chief executive in major league baseball and his Dodgers are certainly in an enviable position to compete in the new global era of sports. But it may be precisely because O’Malley understands the nature of the global game that he recognizes that the Dodgers will need a new financial and organizational base to take advantage of their international head start.

What, then, is likely to happen to the Dodgers and major league baseball? Sometime in the coming decade, professional baseball will probably consider expanding to Asia, with Tokyo and Hong Kong as the two best candidates to get franchises--and the Dodgers and possibly the Oakland As are the two teams most likely to move.

This may be a fanciful scenario. But, as a result of advances in long-distance air transport, it is increasingly feasible. Transoceanic competition would clearly require some adjustments in scheduling, but it could be managed, especially with the advent of interleague play.

Moreover, a move to Asia would produce an economic bonanza for the teams that moved and major league baseball, in general. Fan interest in Japan and the Chinese diaspora would be tremendous--and the potential for increased broadcast and marketing revenues enormous. These are facts that are certain to be in the mind of any prospective Dodger buyer.

But there is an alternative. Baseball could abandon the idea that each team must have a single hometown. Instead of moving lock, stock and barrel, the Dodgers and the A’s, for example, could split their time between their present hosts and their Asian ones. The Dodgers could become the Los Angeles-Tokyo Dodgers and the Oakland A’s the Oakland-Hong Kong A’s.

Such an arrangement would have a number of advantages. It would allow baseball to tap into the Asian market. It would prevent Los Angeles from suffering Brooklyn’s fate. It could help to cement cultural and economic relations between America and Asia. And it could establish a precedent for other sports.

As a lifetime Dodger fan, I share the fears of those who worry that something irrecoverable will be lost in the sale of the Dodgers. But those fears cannot blind us to the fact that, just as the Dodgers’ move west was inevitable, so, too, is the end of family-owned baseball and the idea that communities can expect automatic franchise loyalty.

The question is whether it is possible to turn the globalization of sports into a community asset rather than a liability.*