By GREG COTE
gcote@MiamiHerald.com
KOICHI KAMOSHIDA / GETTY IMAGES
Pitcher Hideki Okajima of the Boston Red Sox pitches during MLB opening game between the Boston Red Sox and the Oakland Athletics at Tokyo Dome on March 25, 2008 in Tokyo, Japan.
Maybe it's just me. I might be a jingoist, or simply a step (or three) behind the grand notion of globalization. But I'm thinking that a lifelong Oakland A's baseball fan should not have to set the alarm for 3 a.m. in order to watch on TV as his team opens the 2008 regular season with a ''home game'' a world away in the Tokyo Dome.
That seems, if you'll pardon an antique phrase, un-American.
At least Boston Red Sox fans could sleep in Tuesday until 6 a.m., their reward, perhaps, for winning the World Series.
The A's and Bosox do it again Wednesday in Japan as Major League Baseball sells its soul to promote itself internationally. Picture Bud Selig in a purple-felt 1970s Superfly hat with a pimp limp, as challenging as that might be.
BAD FOR FANS
There used to be a certain sanctity to American professional sports before globalization became the rather noble code word for disrespecting the fans who built the leagues' popularity in favor of growing the profit potential.
I don't mean players from abroad coming into our leagues. No. That's a very good thing. No one who has watched Yao Ming or Hanley Ramirez perform can be anything but grateful that American sports teams are enriched by imports.
My complaint is when our games are taken from where they should be -- in our stadiums, arenas and ballparks, played before our teams' fans -- and placed elsewhere for no reason but unnecessary, self-serving greed.
Dolphins fans can relate, after seeing last October's ''home game'' against the Giants played in Wembley Stadium in London. Why? Because the NFL Europe league failed to catch on over there, so the NFL is now betting (at hometown fans' expense) that playing regular-season games there may create a spark that catches and turns into broad, lucrative interest.
It is worse, mathematically, that football fans would lose one of only eight real games to this experiment in avarice, yet, somehow, in baseball, it feels worse.
Baseball remains America's National Pastime in some emotional, historical, integral way that no other sport can equal let alone surpass. Even as the ugly spectacle of steroids and Roger Clemens' Congressional testimony echoes, there is something about baseball that is in our national bones the way football isn't.
And Opening Day merits the capital letters only in baseball. Used to, anyway.
Now the sport gives our Opening Day to Tokyo, and it's sacrilege. What's next? Japan takes the Fourth of July, too? How about, in January, we have our presidential inauguration in Mexico City?
I don't blame our pro leagues for trying to grow their popularity beyond U.S. borders because the sale of an officially licensed Manny Ramirez jersey is money in the bank whether it's bought with $100 or 10,000 yen.
But we needn't transplant our real games to accomplish that. The Internet breaks down walls, creates that globalization. Playing exhibition games abroad does that, too.
The NFL has played games outside North America dating to 1976, but they had all properly been exhibitions until the seal was broken (never to be repaired) with a 2005 regular-season 49ers-Cardinals game in Mexico City. But at least that was a trip shorter for both teams than some trips within the states.
Dolphins-Giants in London last fall was the second, the first outside North America, and not to be the last. Commissioner Roger Goodell even blasphemes to suggest he can envision future Super Bowls being held outside the U.S.
At what point do our pro leagues re-pledge their allegiance to the fans who pay their salaries instead of courting foreign dollars?
The NBA has a ''Basketball Without Borders'' global outreach initiative that hits India this July. Terrific. I'm sure it'll be New Dehli-ghtful. League games this season are being broadcast in 215 countries in 41 languages. NBA merchandise is sold in more than 100 countries on six continents. More than half of all hits on NBA.com come from outside the States.
That's not enough? Exhibition games abroad are not enough? Apparently not.
The NBA became the first American pro league to stage a regular-season game outside the U.S. when the Suns and Jazz opened the 1990-91 season with two games in Tokyo. More than a dozen regular-season games abroad have followed.
Baseball played its first regular-season game outside the U.S. with Mets-Padres in Mexico City in 1996. Real games have been hosted in Japan since 2000, Tuesday's the latest.
MORE TRAVELING
Now, the Red Sox will travel 30,000 miles and play in three countries before ever playing a true home game. They'll continue to play spring training games even after opening the regular season. It's insane.
Why are we pandering to Japan, a country that swoons over MLB and whose love of baseball is greater than ours?
Baseball has its World Baseball Classic, another good move toward globalization. Staging regular-season games abroad isn't necessary.
''The internationalization of sports is what we need to do now,'' Selig said Tuesday on the TV broadcast from Japan.
You know what, Bud?
Here's what you need to do even more.
You need to remember you are an American sports league whose priority, without exception, is to treat your teams' fans back home as though they matter most.
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