Watch the video of Harry and Meghan greeting the baseball players.
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The Brits and almost everyone else in Europe are all about soccer (or football, as they would insist) so it was quite historic when two major US baseball clubs finally got to play baseball in London. And none other than Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were there to greet players from the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees.
As the first Major League Baseball that would be played in the UK, it was perhaps fitting that baseball royalty got to meet real-life royalty in the form of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
In order not to seemingly favor either team, the royal pair dressed in neutral black. The Red Sox received the royal couple first in their temporary clubhouse. The team gifted them with a red team onesie along with a miniature baseball bat for the one-month-old Archie, Harry and Meghan’s son.
Outfielder Mookie Betts scored a bonus when Meghan accepted a hug from him. A Boston Globe reporter managed to trace their lineage all the way to the same small Alabama town, making Betts a distant relative of Meghan.
The Yankees, in turn, managed to put one over their New England rivals by gifting an infant-sized jersey with Archie’s name and the number 19 to represent his birth year.
That gift tipped the scales and clearly won Prince Harry over.
He told them, “You guys have beaten next door’s present, by the way.”
The first pitch of the two-game series was thrown by Prince Harry. The games are being held in partnership with the Invictus Games Foundation, the charity that holds sporting events for wounded veterans and was founded by Harry in 2014.
London is only the latest in MLB’s going international. The league had previously held two spring series in Mexico and Tokyo earlier in the year.
Officials had to work overtime to overhaul London Stadium into a proper ballpark in three weeks to make it in time for the games. The venue is most known for hosting the track and field segment for the 2012 Summer Olympics. Nearly 142,000 square feet of artificial turf had to be imported from France and new clubhouses and dugouts were constructed for the series.