AUSTRALIA today, tomorrow the Boston Red Sox? The 2007 baseball season could begin at the Oval rather than Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park after negotiations at “a senior level” between Major League Baseball (MLB) and Surrey County Cricket Club for England’s oldest Test-match venue to stage two regular-season games — the first played in Europe.

The Times understands that a ten-day period in late March and early April 2007 has been provisionally set aside to allow the staging of an exhibition match, followed by two games that will count in the official standings. The Red Sox, the World Series champions, and the Atlanta Braves, one of the most consistently successful teams of the past decade, have expressed interest in being involved.

The move is part of baseball’s desire to widen its appeal beyond the traditional territories of the Americas, South Korea and Japan. Although it has lost Olympic status after 2008, next March will see the inaugural World Baseball Classic, a 16-team world cup.

“The World Baseball Classic represents the next step in the international development of baseball, and this type of event in London would be a further indication of the momentum of that development,” a source close to MLB said.

The previous time the season opened outside North America was in 2004, when the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays played two games in Tokyo. Other regular-season matches have been played in Puerto Rico and Mexico, but taking the opening games to London, well outside what has been seen as natural baseball territory, would represent “a huge statement”.

Other dates were mooted around the mid-season All-Star break, when daylight and weather conditions would be more likely to be favourable, but the teams are understood to have indicated a preference for April, after spring training, which is good news for London’s desire to be seen as a natural setting for prestige sporting events.

The opening day of the baseball season is one of the most significant dates in the American sporting calendar, when the opening pitch is often thrown by the President, so expect Tony Blair to be taking lessons well in advance.

Although Italy and Holland are the strongest baseball-playing nations in Europe, both being invited to the World Classic, neither nation has a stadium of sufficient playing area as well as capacity. Both are blessed with plenty of football grounds, but while their pitches are too narrow, cricket grounds have all the space required.

Discussions between Bill Gordon, the Oval’s head groundsman, and Murray Cook, baseball’s special adviser on fields, over the positioning of home plate and the pitcher’s mound have proved satisfactory.

Recently completed ground developments have increased the Oval’s capacity to 23,000, including 5,000 premium seats. The exercise thus became more financially viable, with the teams needing to be compensated for the loss of gate revenue in their home cities. Anyone doubting whether that many seats would be required need only consider that viewing figures for last season’s World Series games on Five were around the million mark, quite apart from the demand that would be expected from London’s large population of expatriates from baseballplaying countries.

The Oval has other advantages. It stages floodlit cricket, which could be useful given the likely requirements of television in the United States, whose East Coast is five hours behind London. It also has experience of hosting other sports, including Australian Rules football, as well as a minor league game between the New York Mets and the Red Sox in 1993.

It may lack the cachet of, say, Lord’s, but if the 2007 experiment proves a success, the gasometers that form its idiosyncratic backdrop could become as distinctive a part of the fabric of baseball as the Green Monster at Boston’s Fenway Park, or the ivy- covered outfield walls of Wrigley Field in Chicago.