Baseball in China is not as popular as it is in America
As a sports figure and a sports fan, one of the tricky things about finding myself on an extended stay in Shanghai, China is the near isolation from most American sports. Though basketball, over the last ten or so years, has become preferred among the Chinese folk, baseball has still to find its way into the sports culture here. I had heard from some of the locals in Shanghai that there was a baseball team playing in the town, so I did some Google searches to see whether I could find info about the team. I found some articles on the web about the Shanghai Eagles’ spring trip to the U.S. to challenge against junior university groups. The game summaries described a team that had decent pitching, but not very much hitting. As can occur with that sort of team chemistry, the Shanghai club lost all 7 of its exhibition games in the U.S. There had been a total of 50 people attending when the game commenced. Folks came and went as the game progressed. After quickly being spotted as one of the sole white blokes in attendance, I was approached by Dan Washburn, a stories expert doing a tale for Baseball America. During my conversation with him, he said to me that he met some older Chinese men at one of the games he’d attended. He discussed that when he asked them what brought them out to the event, they told him they played ball when they were much younger. So when the Olympic Games come to Beijing in 2008, what are we able to expect from the Chinese team? Will it be sort of an humiliation, like the Greek team’s performance in 2004? Or does the home side have an opportunity to compete? My private opinion is the competition level does not exist in China now for the state team to struggle against the likes of Japan, Taiwan, the U.S, or Cuba. However, if they can get sufficient exposure by playing outside of China, they may just pull off a medal.
