Cubs-Cardinals in London -- MLB's path back to games in the UK - ESPN

LONDON — Rachel Marsh can pinpoint exactly when her Chicago Cubs fandom began. It was one of those groundhog days in lockdown in July 2020 when her friend Sarah, who was video calling from Chicago, told her to put the Cubs-Brewers game on. Intrigued, she watched, and was quickly hooked.

Marsh, a 25-year-old teacher who lives in Kent, England, didn't know the rules, but that was okay: a ton of Google searches and message boards could fix that. She returned to her TV for the rest of the series. Then another series. Within weeks, she was reading about years of the Cubs' failed expectations — and the one year, 2016, when they finally won. She identified with the pain. Within months, Marsh was all in, arguing with newfound friends about on-base percentages (OBP) and earned run averages (ERA), making baseball memes on Twitter and fawning over her favourite player: No. 44, Anthony Rizzo.

«I'm that kind of sports fan. I'm nerdy with it,» Marsh tells ESPN. «Give me those stats. Give me those weird numbers. I love that.»

Every Europe-based baseball fan has a different start to their fandom, when their wee small hours of the morning — the time in the U.K. when games are typically live — start to involve highlights and scrolling for player trade news. What's interesting about Marsh's introduction to baseball is its timing.

MLB landed in London in 2019 with a ludicrously high-scoring series (the New York Yankees won both games over the Boston Red Sox in a series that saw a staggering 50 runs scored) that captivated fans and threw momentum behind the league's effort to grow its European fan base. However, that hype was soon stopped in its tracks. The COVID-19 pandemic robbed the promise of another London series the following summer,