Baseball Series Has Global Flavor

Mia Kim isn’t an avid baseball fan. She’ll tag along if a friend has a free ticket to an Angel or Dodger game or catch an occasional game on television.

But buy a ticket? Never.

That changed this week when Kim stood in line at Angel Stadium and plunked down $135 for five tickets to see her native South Korea play rival Japan in the inaugural World Baseball Classic, which will stop in Anaheim for five days beginning Sunday.

“This is a completely different kind of baseball experience,” said Kim, a 41-year-old kindergarten teacher who lives in La Palma. “This is about showing patriotism and supporting my country.”

The Classic has sold more than 100,000 tickets for the six-game round-robin set that will be played through Thursday in Anaheim. Sunday’s first game is at 1 p.m., followed by a contest at 8 p.m.

Organized by Major League Baseball, the players association and the International Baseball Federation, the 16-team tournament is being played at seven venues over 18 days. The semifinals and finals will be at San Diego’s Petco Park on March 18 and 20.

The plan is to hold the tournament again in 2009, then every four years, but nothing is guaranteed beyond this year.

“If they can get people like me out here,” said Kim, one of about 260,000 Korean Americans in Southern California, “this event could work.”

Attracting casual fans such as Kim was part of Major League Baseball’s goal for the Classic, said Richard Lapchick, a sports sociologist and director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.

“Broadening the game is a big part of what they were looking to do,” Lapchick added. “We’ve saturated the market we have for traditional fan bases. So we’re going to see increased marketing to nontraditional bases, especially if individual athletes from those ethnic communities are playing.”

In reaching out to new markets in Southern California, Major League Baseball spent tens of thousands of dollars promoting the tournament in local Korean and Latino media outlets.

So far, the atmosphere at U.S. stadiums where Classic games have been played has had an international flavor.

In Orlando, Fla., fans of the Dominican Republic paraded throughout the ballpark, blowing horns and waving flags. Venezuelans danced in the aisles, beat drums and chanted in disagreement with umpires’ calls.

It sounded -- and looked -- more like a World Cup soccer game.

“This is what baseball needs: some real enthusiasm,” said 43-year-old Corona resident David McCasey, a fan of the U.S. team who picked up tickets at Angel Stadium to three games.

“I’d rather hear cowbells and horns than see beach balls being tossed around,” he said.

Julia Wong of Fountain Valley said she wasn’t sure how vocal Japanese fans would be. But she expects them to be well-fed with bento boxes, meals in partitioned trays.

“In Japan, people don’t go to the baseball games without them,” said Wong, a second-generation Japanese American.

She will be attending one of Japan’s games with her mother, who is visiting for a few months from Hiroshima, where she’s a fan of the local pro team.

“I couldn’t get my mom out of the house to do anything,” Wong said.

“She wouldn’t even go to Las Vegas. But when we told her Japan was playing here in the World Baseball Classic, she decided she could go to a baseball game.”