For the first time, the country has become the venue for a major international baseball event, with 12 elite European teams competing in the European Championship in Prague, Blansko, Choceň and Olomouc July 7–17.

The widely followed event has offered a key opportunity for corporations to promote themselves through sports.

"We were looking for a sport that would match with the requirements for IT business marketing, and baseball fulfilled the criteria. ... It's a sophisticated game with complicated rules," said Jan Maňas, marketing communications manager for the championship's main sponsor, Fujitsu–Siemens.

In contrast to America, where the game carries the nickname "the national pastime," baseball remains a minor sport in the Czech Republic. Many people wear hats emblazoned with the signature "NY" logo of the famed New York Yankees — the most successful professional sport franchise in the world, with 26 major league championships — without ever realizing that the symbol comes from a ball team.

Corporate sponsors likewise rarely express interest in supporting the game. But the European Championship has become a strong marketing lure for Fujitsu–Siemens.

"Baseball is very popular worldwide, and getting associated with the European Championship here was a great [marketing] opportunity," Maňas said.

Securing exclusive corporate partnerships with "minor" sports in this country has now become a growing challenge.

The advantage of sponsoring such sports lies in a better ratio between the earned marketing exposure and costs spent on subsidies, said Lubomír Janáček, operations director for Altron, an air-conditioning and power-backup systems producer that traditionally sponsors the powerhouse baseball club Sokol Krč.

"From a marketing point of view, it appears to be more effective to be a major sponsor of smaller sports than a minor sponsor of a major sport," Janáček said.

Partnering with minor sports often results from the sporting preferences of a corporation's top managers, or of the regional operations of business and sporting organizations.

Altron got into baseball thanks to the location of its Prague 4 headquarters, near the Sokol Krč baseball center, Janáček said.

In a similar move, Komerční banka turned to rugby, another low-profile sport in the Czech Republic that otherwise enjoys big international recognition. The game lured the bank's sponsorship after French banking group Société Générale took over the bank in 2001.

"Rugby is very popular in France, and it certainly was a strong factor in why the French management decided to support local rugby after arriving in this country," said Komerční banka spokeswoman Marie Petrovová.

Hope for finance

The Czech baseball community hopes the European Championship will help bring more money to the game so that it could develop further in this country.

"The business aspect of this championship is as important as the sporting one," said Petr Ditrich, chairman of the Czech Baseball Association. The opportunity to host the European Championship served as the basis for major reconstruction of baseball sites in the four cities playing host to the games, he said.

Though the European Championship attracted major backers like Fujitsu–Siemens, the organizers originally hoped for higher interest from sponsors.

"Our goal was to secure 10 million Kč [$395,000], but in the end we had to work with 6 million to 7 million Kč," Ditrich said.

Given the current numbers of 50 Czech baseball clubs associated with some 5,000 players, the Czech Baseball Association's annual budget of only about 10 million Kč looked insufficient, he added.

Building up infrastructure

Furthermore, Czech baseball paid a price for not qualifying for the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Ditrich said.

"An Olympic appearance would have advanced the position of baseball [here] by at least five years," he said.

Should the Czech team have qualified for Athens, baseball could have received more subsidies from the state budget for Olympic sports. Also, the game would have risen in the eyes of corporate sponsors.

The Czechs came close to securing a spot, but eventually fell to Italy in pre-Olympic qualifications in summer 2004. The Czechs later filed an unsuccessful protest against what they called illegal participation of naturalized foreign players in the Italian lineup.

Similarly, some teams participating in the European Championship use naturalized foreigners to burnish their rosters.

However, hiring foreigners for the Czech team was not the question of the day for Czech baseball organizers, said the national team's manager, Jakub Vančura.

"It would not pay off to invest in two or three naturalized players, but rather to develop baseball infrastructure in this country," he said.

Vančura said that in the short term, Czech baseball will increase both the number of baseball diamonds and native players.