Yao set to be China's first torchbearer

Yao looks set to be the first to carry the Olympic torch when it comes into China for the first time in Sanya, Southwest China's Hainan Province. According to the route map, it looks like he would be carrying the torch for a 200 meter stretch with Yi Jianlian, fellow countryman and NBA Milwaukee Bucks forward set to be his backup (don't imagine Yao will have a problem jogging 200 meters though).

Is Ichiro's brain bigger than mine?

That's what Dr. Kenichiro Mogi (nice naming coincidence there....), a celebrity brain scientist in Japan says, or at least that his brain is better than mine.

Ichiro says he's eaten the same thing for lunch (homemade Japanese curry cooked by his wife Yumiko) before home games for all 7 years of his career in Seattle, and when on the road prefers cheese pizza, easy on the sauce and fluffy on the edges. Doc attributes this routine for Ichiro's consistency at the plate. This isn't too hard to believe, baseball players more than athletes from any other sport are creatures of habit, abiding zealously by their pre-game rituals that every player has whether it's when they wake up, what they eat or their specific pre-game workout routine.

Where Dr. Mogi goes a little off the beaten path is when he says that Ichiro has remarkable "metacognition". Dr Mogi says "It's the ability to observe yourself as if you're observing your own internal state from the outside. Of course, it's all your own feeling, but you can access and analyze it as if you are observing it from an objective point of view."

Dr. Mogi says Ichiro has an ability to be able to separate himself from his body after an at-bat and be able to analyze all the feelings, sensations, emotions and other "intagibles" that he felt during the at-bat and figure out what he did wrong.

Really sounds like either the doc or Ichiro are full of it (probably even both of them....)... but baseball is a game of numbers and numbers of all things don't lie...

"Ichiro begins this season with 1,592 hits in the major leagues, just more than halfway to 3,000 in his seven years with the Mariners. If he plays beyond his new five-year deal that begins this season, he could conceivably achieve 3,000 hits in the major leagues. He'd be in his 40s, but 10 of the 27 players to reach the milestone achieved it in their 40s.

Adding his 1,278 hits from Japan, 3,000 more in America would give Ichiro more lifetime hits than Pete Rose's 4,256, currently the most of any pro to ever swing a bat."

Maybe his brain is better than mine.

Sports > Politics

It's worth noting... for all the "we'll officially declare war on Taiwan if they declare independence" crap that China spews, sport seems to transcend that...

During the MLB Beijing series, many fans that were in attendance didn't know a single from a wild pitch, but when Taiwanese shortstop Chin-Lung Hu of the Dodgers came up to bat for the first time, the crowd erupted and was cheered wildly... maybe it was because it was the first Asian face seen during the game... but the fact he was from a politically hostile country seemed to not be obvious at all.

Chin-Lung Hu

Even Korean right-hand pitcher Chan Ho Park of the Dodgers was popular with Chinese fans. The fact that South Korea (where Park is from) fought the terrible Korean war against China less than 50 years ago was of no importance during this baseball-centered weekend.

Chan Ho Park

Many analysts that are watching MLB make their push into China seem to be on the pessimistic side of things, not quite believing that baseball will catch on in China like basketball has.... but I'll go out on a limb and say that I bet I know what every Chinese fan in the stands was thinking when Hu and Park came up...."oh man, I wish he was Chinese... is it that impossible?"


Just say when.

Padres and Dodgers in Beijing

Now playing at the Wukesong Stadium, the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers??

Chin-Lung Hu chatting with the Chinese National Team

OK, spit out the first thing that comes into your mind when I say baseball in the Far East.... Daisuke Matsuzaka.... Ichiro Suzuki...... Hideki Matsui...... right? Just a few of the names that'll pop right up. Notice a trend? All from the land of the rising sun.

Now name a MLB player from China....... drawing a blank? So am I...

So that is why this weekend was a momentous past few days in Beijing, China for reasons completely unrelated to the Summer Olympics.

Baseball has always faced adversity in China. In the 1960s, Communist Leader Mao Zedong banned the game because it had Western roots and the sport has struggled to gain mainstream interest in the country since his death in 1976. This is in opposition to the cult like following baseball has in Japan ever since American Professor at the University of Tokyo, Horace Wilson introduced the game in 1872.

No hometown fans here... just generic MLB hats at the Beijing game

Arguably the greatest reason that baseball hasn't caught on yet in the land of 1.5 billion, is that they don't have a good reason to get excited about it.... or to be more accurate, no one to get excited about.
Ichiro Suzuki single-handedly brought baseball to the entire country of Japan in 2001.
Yao Ming made 3 pointers and the crossover household terms to 1.5 billion people in 2002.
Chien-Ming Wang brought the sinker-ball and strikeout to the dinner table as conversation topics for every family in Taiwan.

Dodgers squad on the Great Wall....the Great Wall!!

Who will bring baseball to China and when? The MLB is looking to answer that question starting with this past weekend. The LA Dodgers and San Diego Padres played a 2 game series this past weekend in Beijing's Wukesong Stadium. The Friday night game was played to a 3-3 tie and the Padres beat the Dodgers 6-3 on Saturday night. But more important than the score of the two games was the fact that this was the first American Major League game in China... ever. Exhibition games are common place in Japan with the Boston Red Sox season opener to be held in Japan over the venerable Fenway Park.

Who of China's young athletes will make the jump and bring back the passion of baseball?

Former NY Yankees skipper Joe Torre on the Great Wall

24 and counting...

Thank you to Forbes.com for this graphic...



While it's certainly a great sign that major league sports in the United States are reaching out to other countries in an attempt to diversify team rosters, we can't ever forget that it'll always be about the money to the guys in suits...

Yung Chi Chen from Taiwan, minor league star second
baseman for the Seattle Mariners

Chien-Ming Wang from Taiwan,
right hander for the New York Yankees

Takashi Saito (right) from Japan, right-hand relief pitcher for the LA Dodgers
Hiroki Kuroda (left) from Japan, right-hand relief pitcher for the LA Dodgers


Kazuo Fukumori of Japan, right-hand pitcher for the Texas Rangers


Jae Kuk Ryu of South Korea, right-hand pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays

Shin-Soo Choo of Korea, outfielder for the Cleveland Indians


Yasuhiko Yabuta of Japan, right-hand pitcher for the Kansas City Royals (struck out Alex Rodriguez, Derrek Lee and Johnny Damon in the World Baseball Classic in 2006 for Japan)

Yi Jianlian's Impact on Milwaukee

When you talk about Chinese communities in the United States, the first thing that comes to mind are established Chinatowns in major cities, enclaves that immigrants from mainland China tend to congregate in; San Francisco, New York City, Vancouver, Seattle, Chicago and even Boston. All of these cities have established institutions that cater specifically to Chinese residents (churches, schools, newspapers), and were among the first cities that the Chinese chose to settle down in over 200 years ago.

So in due deference to the blog, we return to the point... All of these cities would be hospitable places for a mainland Chinese athlete (or any mainland Asian athlete for that matter...) to come over and make their stateside debut on a team.

Chien-Ming Wang came over from Tainan, Taiwan (don't even start with the China/Taiwan stuff.....) to the New York Yankees, a city with almost 400,000 Chinese residents (big .pdf file).

Ichiro Suzuki came over from Japan to Seattle, Washington, a city with 74,000 Asian residents.

Even Yao Ming, from Shanghai, China came over to Houston, Texas with a formidable 100,000 Asian residents and 24,000 Chinese residents.

So what happens when highly touted Chinese basketball player Yi Jianlian (second only to Yao Ming in national heroism) makes the notoriously difficult east-to-west transition and gets drafted by a team in a city with a minimal, if not non-existent Chinese population? Well for a few, everyone from the Chinese Basketball Association reluctant to release one of their home-grown star athletes to a city without a substantial Chinese-American presence, to his agent Dan Fegan who was concerned that Yi wouldn't get a contract worth his skill in a low-cap sports market like Milwaukee.

Last one to the Great Wall is a crappy foul shot shooter....... GO!

So after this bleak painting of Milwaukee, it looks as if things aren't so bad for the Chinese community in Milwaukee after all....
On the campus of the nationally known Marquette University sits the Modern Chinese School in the university's language building, teaching 250+ diligent 7-10 year olds Chinese nursery rhymes and vocabulary every Sunday morning.
The launch party for The Milwaukee Chinese Times, the area's first Chinese-language newspaper which published its inaugural issue on Dec 29th, was held mid-afternoon before the highly anticipated 200 million+ viewership event of the Chinese Superbowl, Bucks vs Rockets, Yao vs Yi. The game also coinciding just one week before 1.7 billion Chinese people around in the world ushered in the Year of the Rat for Chinese New Year.

Milwaukee's getting there...

Yeah, that's what I said..


Chinese journalists outnumbering American reporters
are not that common of a sight in an NBA locker room...

Little Fukudome

So you think Kosuke Fukudome's arrival to the Cubs is a big deal to the south side of Chicago and the franchise??

Looks like the impact is mutual. According to Japanese linguists, his newborn son (born a couple of weeks after he signed with the Cubs), named Hayato;the name is a blend of "Windy City" and "uniform number 1".



Look like he's having a helluva time for his first few weeks in Chicago though...