Baseball in Belgium?

By Bruce Crumley

While the rest of Europe gazed at televised action of recently resumed pro soccer leagues, millions of European sports fans last month tuned in to a decidedly more alien event: Major League Baseball slugger Barry Bonds' surpassing Hank Aaron's home-run record in far-off San Francisco. But viewers who caught the No. 756 coup de circuit from Toulouse weren't squinting at a blurry feed from mlb.com Instead, many Europeans watched Bonds' blast on the North American Sports Network (NASN)--a channel that is spreading that particular strain of U.S. sports mania to Europe.

Founded in 2002 with the mission of offering exclusive MLB rights to an initial base of about 50,000, mainly hardball-starved expats, NASN now beams a variety of more than 800 live or slightly delayed U.S. and Canadian sporting events to 10 million homes across Europe. This year NASN has added nine countries, including Portugal and Kazakhstan, bringing its total to 32, with the number of digital platforms carrying the channel in each market growing just as rapidly.

Officials at NASN, now run by the Disney-owned U.S. sports boss ESPN--which bought the independent European channel from Irish broadcaster Setanta Sports and venture-capital group Benchmark Capital Europe in 2006 for a reported $120 million--say their goal is to reach 100 million households in Europe, surpassing espn's 93 million subscribers in the U.S. The last person to call such an ambitious shot may have been Babe Ruth, but NASN executives say they've tapped into a growing demographic of European sports fans who no longer consider American baseball, football, college basketball or even NASCAR exotic distractions between soccer games. "The world is flattening out, and we're seeing there's really a large number of people in Europe who have developed an affinity, enthusiasm and knowledge of U.S. sports," says Amory Schwartz, co-founder and ceo of NASN. "These aren't just people wearing Yankee caps because it's cool."

They also aren't only baseball fans. Indeed, Schwartz says, variety has been essential to the network's growth, fueled by securing broadcast rights of U.S. sports leagues with varying appeal across markets. Although the National Football League pulled the plug on its European operation, the popularity of the NFL in Germany, he says, made getting broadcast rights essential. Meanwhile, National Basketball Association-crazy nations like France, Spain and Serbia have an appetite for NCAA hoops--especially when locals like France's Joakim Noah become stars of the U.S. college scene. How do you say March Madness in Serbo-Croatian?

Though a homesick U.S. contingent forms a large bloc of NASN viewers, ESPN International executive vice president Russell Wolff says an even larger bloc comprises Europeans attracted to American sports. Some, he says, have lived in the U.S., while others have such a passion for all sports that their horizons have expanded. For other Europeans, the National Hockey League, say, offers the best opportunity to see their hometown skaters. "In the NHL, 217 players--30% of the total--come from Europe," Wolff notes. "In countries like the Czech Republic, Finland, Sweden and others where hockey is the big sport, being able to watch their countrymen in NHL games is huge."

And NASN programming contains something Europeans need in order to jaw knowledgeably with displaced Yanks: the motormouthed color commentary from the ESPN, Fox Sports, CBS, MSG and Raycom networks, which Schwartz says gives Euroviewers "the local San Francisco, L.A. or Detroit background and feel." Good luck handling that NASCAR drawl, y'all.

Though marquee U.S. leagues are NASN's big draw, the channel doesn't shrink from sports that even Americans ignore such as Arena and Canadian football and Major League Lacrosse. As for the U.S. version of the global game, NASN dropped Major League Soccer when viewers complained that they got better matches from local leagues. That means L.A. Galaxy star David Beckham's best chance of appearing on NASN is if he can start bending curveballs like L.A. Dodgers star Brad Penny.