This is cool: Major League Baseball is partnering with the Australia Baseball Federation to create a new winter league for Major Leaguers staying fresh in the offseason and native Australians looking to make their mark. The article doesn’t make it clear, but I assume it will work like winter ball in Venezuela or the Dominican Republic, where Major League teams often dispatch young players to hone their games in the offseason.

We tend to look at the years since the 1994 player strike as “The Steroid Era” or some such nonsense, but we overlooked that 1994 was also the year Chan Ho Park made his Major League debut, ushering in a new era of Asian players in the Majors. The following year brought Nomomania, and since then Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese players have become common sights on Major League rosters.

Since that year — an arbitrary endpoint, no doubt — we have also seen a growing trickle from Aruba, Australia, Colombia, Curacao, Netherlands Antilles and Nicaragua, along with the consistent influx of players from Canada, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. To date, there has still only been one player hailing from a ship on the Atlantic Ocean.

I suppose that, with leagues now rolling in Italy and the Netherlands, the Majors will boast more European players soon. Teams have also done outreach work in China and India, two countries with massive populations crazy for sport. Multiple organizations are working to spread the game in Africa.

Simply put, baseball is becoming more global. I imagine this is all tied up with the Internet, another thing that has gone more global since 1994, since there’s just so much more information available to everyone now. Now we not only know about Yu Darvish, but we can follow his career in stats and video.

It’s cool, and I’m certain it’s a very, very good thing for the sport. In high school, I often got in arguments with soccer players over which game was better. They’d fall back on the argument that people all over the world played soccer, and I’d insist that was just because people all over the world hadn’t seen baseball yet. Now, people are seeing baseball, and they see that it is good.