I USED TO FOLLOW THE RED SOX: NOW THEY FOLLOW ME (TO LONDON)

This weekend, the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees will meet for two games at London’s Olympic Stadium. Lifelong Red Sox fan and long-time London expat Mike Carlson has broadcast and written about American sport for British audiences for the better part of 30 years. He worked for Major League Baseball and staged a game between Red Sox and Mets minor leaguers at London’s Oval Cricket Ground in 1993. Now he gets to see his team take on the Evil Empire, for real, at ‘home’….

Had you asked me when I moved to Britain in 1977, whether it were more likely the Boston Red Sox would win a World Series championship or play the New York Yankees in London, I would have reluctantly confessed that, while the Sox overcoming Babe Ruth’s Curse to win their first title since 1918 was highly unlikely, the odds of their playing in Britain were about the same as staging a FIFA World Cup final in Dubai, or seeing some tacky New York real estate hustler being elected President.

I have broadcast baseball in both this country and Ireland and I have worked for Major Baseball, but I have also, for my sins, been a baseball fan and, more punishingly, a Boston Red Sox fan all my life. To understand what this means, you might consider that when the Americans remade Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (a book whose nostalgia for old style soccer/football-supporting owes much to the baseball renaissance of the 1980s) they made Jimmy Fallon a Red Sox fan. I should point out, to those who fear creeping American cultural…