I saw this piece Baseball’s sold its soul in a few places today and finally got around to giving it a read. Written by Jeff Schultz of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the article reads just as its title suggests.

There have been others, Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Tribune asks Why is the American Game opening in…Japan? Another writer from the AJC went so far as to evoke Pearl Harbor in his vote against.

As I was watching the game last night I too was captivated by the surreal nature of the whole thing. First of all, I’ve never watched live MLB baseball in the evening here in Korea. Night games EST are 8 a.m. games here in Korea. The west coast games usually wrap up by the early afternoon. I like this because it allows me to kick back with some coffee and breakfast as I flip from game to game on MLB.com. As I eat lunch the games in Seattle and San Diego are usually winding down.

I’ve always maintained baseball is one of America’s greatest cultural achievements. When I say “cultural” I mean, as in arts and leisure. I’m talking things like R&B and jazz, free-form poetry, vaudeville (I suppose), and the cinematic revolution of the early 70s, as opposed to the invention of the airplane or the light bulb. You don’t have to agree with that, but that’s the prism from which I view baseball. As art. All of the above became institutions because of their ability to improvise. To continue to move when other forms stand still. Baseball is no different.

In the piece Schultz compares the opening of Major League Baseball in Japan to opening the sumo season at Fenway Park. In a sense he’s right, and it’s important to note that would never ever happen. Would Nippon Professional Baseball open it’s season in America? No way.

But it wouldn’t have cause to either. Major League Baseball is clearly the baseball league of the world and NPB is not. MLB has selected itself as, promoted itself as, and expanded itself as, a baseball league for the world at large since almost the very beginning. To my knowledge NPB has never tried to compete with MLB on a global scale, unless you count the signing of Bob Horner as an attempt. It certainly can’t compete, and instead has been pushed (and pushed itself) into a corner by the cajoling of some of it’s biggest stars, one of whom was perched on the mound at the start of last night’s game.

The thing that’s entirely lost on people like Schultz is that there are aspects of the Japanese game that are as traditional as anything in the American game. Kōshien, the Japanese high school baseball tournament that kicked off last week, has been rolling along in Hanshin Kōshien Stadium since 1924. The stadium opened one year after Yankee Stadium, arguably the second most sacred standing stadium in American baseball, which won’t be used for much longer in case you haven’t heard.

Major League Baseball became a non-traditional game a long time ago and opening the 2008 season in Japan is just the latest in a long line of non-traditional choices the league has made, many within my own (relatively short) lifetime — the first night game at Wrigley, the choice to allow Sunday Night Baseball kick off the season instead of the Cincinnati Reds, the DH, the list goes on and on.

In a sense, and this is just my opinion again, this is what makes baseball great. MLB is not quintessentially American baseball and it was never really meant to be once it started calling its championship The World Series in 1903. When you consider that it’s actually taken the game a long time for to become “traditional.” In a sense it just took another step to fulfilling that promise. It took one more step away from  simply, and  arrogantly, being  prophetic.

I would ask Schultz if he has a problem when Opening Day happened in Mexico in 1999, Puerto Rico in 2001, or, oops, even Tokyo in the year 2000 or 2004. My guess is that he remember that now half of the Opening Days in the past decade have been abroad.

Ok, so Schultz and the rest are writing for big newspapers and are filling a demand. I’m sure they’re are plenty of people in the Atlanta area and elsewhere who feel the same. And like him, they have no real idea about baseball or tradition. MLB having its Opening Day in Japan is  wholly traditional. What’s slightly nontraditional is that  Americans had to drag their butts out of bed at 6 a.m. to watch it.

Well, I didn’t. I just had pull my dinner table out from behind the fridge,  and spoon my rice out of the cooker.