2018 major league baseball

All 30 Major League Baseball teams were scheduled to be in action when the season opened Thursday, the first time in 50 years that the organization slotted every team to play on opening day. It’s also probably the last for a while. MLB plans to open the season in Asia next year and in 2020, which—if past openers in Japan and Australia are any indication—means a staggered start to those seasons, allowing for travel.

But the owners and players have also committed to games in England in June during both seasons, setting up the sport’s most international season ever. (The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are near an agreement to play two games at London Stadium next year.) In the trip across the Atlantic, baseball will be following the NFL and NBA. Like those leagues, MLB will find both a deep culture of fandom and broad ambivalence about the game itself.

The NFL staged its first game in London at Wembley Stadium in 2007 and has played at least two games there every year since 2013. The league has also announced a 10-year agreement with Tottenham Hotspur to play games at the Premier League team’s new stadium, which is due to open later this year. The Jacksonville Jaguars, a football fixture at Wembley since 2013, have signed on to play there once a year until at least 2020.

The NBA, for its part, began playing at least one regular season game at the 02 arena in London in 2011 (with a brief interruption caused by a labor dispute in 2012). MLB has yet to play a game in Europe.

In the short term, playing in London creates immediate buzz on both sides of the Atlantic. Both the NFL and the NBA routinely sell out, and London games produce a reliable stream of news coverage. The longer-term impact is harder to detect. According to an annual tracking survey by Nielsen Sports, 12.9 percent of U.K. residents say they’re interested in the NFL; 12.1 percent express interest in the NBA and 7.6 percent in MLB. The tallies show little change in the last three years.