When you walk into The 108, you’re immediately steeped in baseball.
MLB team banners line the center hallway. Turf from the 2019 Yankees-Red Sox London Series carpets the batting cages. You might see dads setting up batting practice or tossing grounders on the infield. Groups of teenagers, perhaps just looking to hit in the cages, might roll in, or teams may shift practice to The 108 on short notice. One of the founders might be helping with infield drills. There could even be a corporate outing of adults intrigued by the idea of hitting in the cage and then relaxing with a beer and a baseball game.
It’s all part of the facility’s vision: take advantage of a highly populated London location and grow the game among players who can’t get enough baseball and potential fans who don’t even know what they’re about to get themselves into.
Opened in January 2024, The 108 is an indoor baseball and softball facility with a full-size infield, four batting cages enabled with HitTrax technology and two bullpens. Located in an up-and-coming London neighborhood called Brent Cross Town, it serves as a training facility and social space, with a bar, coffee shop and barbecue restaurant among the entertainment offerings. With a name inspired by the number of stitches on a baseball, The 108 is the largest indoor baseball and softball facility in Europe.
“Our goal at The 108 is to monetize what we believe is untapped demand in Greater London and spend it developing youth baseball in the UK,” said co-founder Max Trautman.
This project was a labor of love for Trautman and his co-founder, Michael Wakelam. They were struck with the idea around a decade ago while coaching Little League together in London. The two come from far-flung baseball backgrounds – Wakelam grew up in Australia, while Trautman is from Washington, D.C. – but both brought their love of baseball to England while lamenting the lack of local baseball facilities.
With football, cricket and rugby reigning supreme there, it’s hard to convince London investors that an indoor baseball facility is a viable business plan – which is why, Wakelam emphasized, it was crucial to have The 108 immerse both fans and players in “the language of baseball.” But an indoor baseball and softball facility with an MLB-regulation infield was a unique proposition that addresses several challenges related to growing baseball in Britain.
One, of course, is the near-constant threat of rainfall. And the outdoor baseball and softball fields that do exist are often shoehorned into non-MLB-regulation dimensions or aren’t outfitted to be usable even after rain has passed through.
“You don’t have fields that are created in a manner that can handle the type of rain that you have in Great Britain,” said Josh Chetwynd, a broadcaster and journalist who has also played on Great Britain’s national baseball team. “It’s as much about drainage and those issues as it is about the idea that it’s raining all the time and you’re going to get rained off.”
Once plans for The 108 were in motion, Wakelam and Trautman looped in Major League Baseball to provide state-of-the-art technology for the batting cages and bullpens via HitTrax, so aspiring sluggers and hurlers can receive immediate feedback on their metrics. In exchange, the MLB Europe office in London can use the space to film as much content as they need to help grow the game.
This content included a segment for this year’s London Series featuring star British cricket player Jos Buttler and longtime MLB player Chase Utley showing each other a thing or two about their respective sports.
“That's a great example of needing a venue that has that sort of serious kit that we're able to use, and we were able to bring both the British sports hero and Chase, who's a Phillies legend, there to animate it,” said Ben Ladkin, managing director of MLB Europe. “We always knew that the baseball community would embrace it and it'd be great for the teams that are already existing to practice and play and to bring their skills upward. But for it to be there for new people finding the sport is also really important.
“One of the things that we always are trying to do is show how much fun baseball is to watch with your friends, and live we have very limited opportunities to do that. But if you can do that in a nice social atmosphere, then that's fantastic.”
For parents in the London area with kids interested in baseball, it can be challenging to find enough outlets for their child to play. Jeremy Wagner, a regular visitor to The 108, has often run into roadblocks looking for baseball facilities for his 14-year-old son Owen. Cricket facilities exist, he said, but sometimes the owners just want them to be used for cricket. In fall and winter, by the time school ends, it’s dark, and there are very few parks with lighted baseball facilities. And of course, there’s the rain.
Now, Owen’s baseball coaches (he plays for the London Mets and other teams via the London Youth Baseball League) can reschedule practice to The 108 on a washed-out weekend. Even more importantly, kids like Owen can play baseball at The 108 in a non-structured setting with their friends whenever they want.
“A lot of times, they only play in this organized way, and so the kids don't do it with each other,” Wagner said. “What I'm trying to instill in them is, ‘You guys can go do this yourself.’ … I'm trying to get them to see how they can use [The 108] that way, where … you just call your friends up and say, ‘Hey, let's go throw batting practice to each other.’”
So what’s next for The 108? Since it is indoors, the chilly baseball offseason is its time to shine, and Wakelam and Trautman are figuring out how The 108 can best serve the public in the summer. With MLB’s involvement, new technology could be implemented as it becomes available. There are also possibilities for expansion – could it be franchised in other areas like Manchester? That would help create the “regional hubs” that Chetwynd believes are crucial to growing British baseball infrastructure, but The 108 is still in an experimental phase itself.
For now, its home base in Brent Cross Town is already doing more than enough to serve the baseball-seeking residents of London.
“For me personally, apart from the use that everybody else gets, it's kind of a field of dreams,” Wakelam said. “From the very beginning when we started drafting the business plan, the business plan name was ‘a field of dreams.’ And so it is that for us. We just love the fact that it's here.”