I still have criticisms of the event that I believe to be fair: it was absolutely overpriced and many of the empty seats (in the shade anyway) were likely due to ticket scalpers who blew their investment. Social media was riven with people who "could no longer make it" before the event, the UK Red Sox Facebook group must have had 500 people trying to shift tickets like that in the month before the event. Thanks to monitoring Stubhub, I got my tickets for way below face (£90 for two tickets valued at £140), and got upgraded to some primo seats for Game 1 at no cost thanks to a friend's friend making a few phone calls. A lot of friends in the softball community who were originally interested either didn't go at all, or only went to one game rather than both.
MLB are playing with fire if they trot out these ticket prices for next year, with two teams who wouldn't have as many UK fans as the Yankees and Red Sox. Or European fans - no Dutch players on either the Cubs and Cardinals, and from experience pretty much anybody in a Gregorius or Bogaerts shirt was Dutch and you saw a LOT of those shirts. Plus guys wearing Dutch national team stuff.
In things that are less important: you had to search to find a decent ballpark hot dog (I did, but they didn't seem widely available). The merchandising was all messed up: after being a cynic, I actually really did want a keychain or a magnet or something (and so did my Anglophile mom) but the queues for merch were ridiuclous. You either had to miss half the game queuing up in the stands inside the stadium grounds or queue up for an hour to visit the superstore. MLB needs to have merchandise superstores on every bridge approach to the stadium next year, instead of one.
Also, scorecards for sale or in the programme would have been nice. I like keeping score at a game. A guy across the aisle from me took out his notepaid and sketched out a scorecard on it, so I guess that's two that would have been sold.
Finally, this is extremely subjective and some may disagree, but I thought the stewards were kind of dicks and clearly didn't appreciate baseball crowds are very different from soccer crowds. I found a group of people who were standing behind the seats down the right field line and watched a few innings from there. Then out of nowhere stewards start saying we have to move back to the wall for health and safety reasons. OK fine, although anybody who lives in UK knows health and safety is the ultimate bullshit dump. Then we have to move period. I think by this point people were tuning out the stewards who couldn't agree a consistent line, so in the end it was a dude aggressively shouting at us that we couldn't stand there because we don't have tickets. Which is true, but that's normally something people don't care about in MLB parks so long as you're not in people's way. And US ushers have the tact not to pull this power trip in the bottom of the 7th inning with the bases loaded and Rafael Devers up as the tying run.
But other than that, it was great. London Stadium makes a surprisingly cromulent baseball park, and the views in the upper deck down the lines really weren't too bad - my theory is the distance from the field is mitigated somewhat by the fact the upper deck isn't perched on top of two levels of luxury boxes and a club section. Everybody was friendly and in a good mood, there was good banter between the Yankee and Red Sox fans and a lot of the UK-based fans (myself included) were plainly delighted at being in a space with tens of thousands of other real-life baseball fans. The odd thing about social media is it allows you to discover there are other baseball fans in the UK, but nothing beats actually being in the room as it were. All weekend, you could find yourself in a conversation with somebody about their cool jersey or hat, the play that just happened, etc.