Major League Baseball Announces Exhibition Games in China
Major league baseball announced exhibition games in China for March 15-16. The games will be played by the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers. It will be the first time that professional baseball (of the non-Asain variety) has been played in that country.
According to Wikipedia, baseball first appeared in China in 1863 with the formation of the Shanghai Baseball club established by a medical missionary by the name of Henry William Boone. Organized games were played in 1905 between St. Johns University and the Shanghia MCA baseball club. But in 1959, chaiman Mao outlawed baseball, believing it to be an American indulgence. After the cultural revolution in 1974 baseball in China was resurrected and then in 2002 the China baseball league was formed.
Of course, if one is to read the article associated with the link below, baseball was discovered by China and played as early as the Ming Dynasty back in the 1300’s, predating the earliest American discoveries by 400 years. Remnants of thick sticks and perfectly spherical wooden balls coated with rubber like material were discovered when construction was occuring at one of the Olympic sites. How ironic. Below is the link:
http://www.thehumanaught.com/blog/2007/04/01/chinese-invented-baseball/
So the South China Morning Post reported that on January 27, baseball paraded out Los Angeles Dodgers manager (and former Yankee) Joe Torre and Hall of Fame slugger and San Deigo Padres vice president Dave Winfield to announce the event. They had seven youngsters posing in front of the cameras with the stars and everyone talked a good game. If anyone has played a professional sport for a living, there are always those that can talk a good game. Finding those players that can play a good game is always a challenge. One must wonder whether major league baseball is promoting their sport for the betterment of baseball, or for the betterment of Major League Baseball. Imagine all the Yankee hats and jackets they could sell to the consumers in China if that sport ever achieved the Yao Ming type popularity that exists for basketball.
I think back to the creation of the World Cup Classic major league baseball announced without a lot of consultation with other countries about the event. There appeared to be no thought to the fact that baseball already had an event called the World Cup that had been played in a number of countries since 1938. The United States traditionally sent college players to compete against the Cuban professionals in these events and the results were fairly predictable. Until last year, they had only won the event two times, in 1973 and 1974. Cuba meanwhile has won the event 25 times. It will be a long time until the United States can catch up to that acheivement.
The U.S. allowed the Asian teams to hold their elimination rounds of the World Cup Classic in Tokyo after Japan threatened not to participate. Major league baseball insisted that the finals be played in the United States. There has been no announcement of where the World Cup Classic will be played in 2009, but it is expected that major league baseball will want the championship games played in the United States in major league stadiums.
It has been argued that Japanese fans only came out to support the Japanese team when the Asian preliminaries were played in Tokyo and didn’t draw the crowds when non-Japanese teams played against each other. Granted, the games did draw large crowds to the events when played in the United States, but to be truely embraced as a “World Cup Classic” it should be played at different venues around the world. Otherwise, it should be just called the United States Invitational Cup Classic. After all, there is no qualifying for these games. You make the request, and major league baseball determines if you are worthy enough to play.
So major league baseball has made their trek into China. It will be truely interesting to see if this trek is to promote the growth of baseball there, or if the major league executives are only attracted by the dollar signs major league baseball will receive from merchandise sales if the Chinese population embraces baseball. Only time will tell. As one former Chinese player now Seattle Mariner minor league catcher Wang Wei commented in the China baseball website (www.cbl.org.cn) ”if the baseball playing population of China was half that of the soccer playing population we could definitely beat Chinese Taipei, Korea and Japan. We have over 1.3 billion people here and there’s got to be someone that can throw 150/160 km per hour. And there has got to be someone that can run faster than Ichiro Suzuki.”