Yesterday, on a perfect afternoon for baseball, under a cloudless sky and with a light breeze blowing from right field to left, Yankee Stadium was the ideal park in which to introduce 50 of the best prospects in the game, including Fernando Martinez of the Mets and Jesus Montero of the Yankees. New York may even have been the ideal city, as the capital of baseball was only able to fill about one in five seats for the Futures Game. This gave the kids a good idea both of how nice the majors can be, and of how much you count for with the fans until you make it there.

The Futures Game is one of the best ideas in baseball, if one of the few the sport doesn’t promote so well as it deserves. (The biggest applause yesterday didn’t come for any blue-chip prospect, but for Tino Martinez, who was coaching one of the teams.) Now in its 10th year, the annual showcase has highlighted more or less every great young player in the majors — Jose Reyes, David Wright, Joba Chamberlain, Miguel Cabrera, Joe Mauer, the Upton brothers, and C.C. Sabathia, to name a few — and there’s little doubt that players who will reach their level were on the field in the Bronx yesterday. The whole question is who they were.

One of them may well be Martinez. The 19-year-old, currently at Class AA, looked perfectly comfortable in the stadium’s big center field and seemed absolutely to be trying to drive the ball upstate on the first pitch he saw. He missed it, and then pulled Trevor Cahill’s next pitch for a sharp single. Both the ridiculous cut and the smaller, sharper one augured well. The first took confidence, the second smarts.

On yesterday’s evidence, tomorrow’s future stars were almost all born abroad. These games are organized around a U.S. vs. the World theme, and the World, which won 3-0, had by far the better of it. Boston outfielder Che-Hsuan Lin — who was mercilessly jeered as he accepted the game’s MVP award — hit a key two-run home run, Dodgers second baseman Ivan De Jesus went 2-for-3 with a walk and was robbed of a fourth hit, and the World’s endless parade of hard-throwing pitchers, limited to one inning apiece, held the U.S. to three hits. They played a far livelier if less fundamentally sound game and inspired some incredibly obscene chants from the right field bleachers, the denizens of which apparently don’t like the rest of the world.

This last bit was especially embarrassing, as an unavoidable subtext of the whole game was the current federal investigation into whether major league executives have been stealing bonus money from Dominican prospects. Over the weekend, one Dominican paper tied the Yankees to the scandal, alleging that center fielder Melky Cabrera had been a victim of a skimming scheme. Another paper claimed that one unnamed prospect, who purportedly got a $500,000 bonus, only actually received $200,000. All of this puts a different spin on the idea of U.S. vs. the World, an idea whose time may be up.

Whether baseball persists in pretending that there’s a difference between ballplayers who happen to be born here and those who aren’t, some of our future stars will be American-born, and yesterday some of them got to show off. Cleveland’s Matt LaPorta, lately famous as the man who was traded for Sabathia, lived up to his reputation exactly with patience, quiet hands, a looping swing, and a nicely pulled base hit. His former Huntsville teammate Mat Gamel, a Milwaukee property, drew two walks and looked as if he’d be as happy as not to draw 10 more if that’s how many it took to get a good sound pitch to drive. And Oakland’s Brett Anderson picked off two men back-to-back, a heady trick for a 20-year-old. These three, among others, are likely as not true future stars, and it’s a shame they didn’t get to show a bigger audience why that is.

It’s easy to understand why the Futures Game doesn’t get the kind of prime-time blackout coverage the Home Run Derby does. No-names who may never amount to anything aren’t a great sell to advertisers or television executives, and without that backing, the no-names are a hard sell to all but hard-core fans. In a literal sense, though, today’s Matt LaPorta is tomorrow’s Ryan Braun, and the more baseball can do to encourage a sense of investment in the best players in the minors, the more attached fans will be to them as they work their way up the ladder.

Baseball has tried for years to make its draft a capital-E Event, as the NBA’s and the NFL’s are, with predictably dire results — ballplayers take far too long to make the majors for anyone to care about it. If the idea is just to get fans excited about what’s coming up tomorrow, though, the answer may already be at hand, ready for the kind of marketing push that’s made tonight’s glorified batting practice session appointment viewing.

tmarchman@nysun.com