The Wukesong Baseball Field.


Fourteen years later, with the National League again celebrating a victory, China is a much different place. There are more people online here than live in the U.S., albeit accessing the internet through a giant, government-erected content filter. There's a Starbucks everywhere you go in the largest Chinese cities. The economic miracle that is China has fully blossomed.

And baseball, the 2010 All Star game specifically, was shown live today for the first time on Chinese TV.

China's embrace of America's pastime is still tentative. Yet, the willingness of Chinese TV executives to share the game live with a potential audience of 350 million people in China's southern provinces, the nation's temperate areas where the government hopes to nurture the nation's appetite for balls and strikes, feels like a milestone to me.

There are no effective audience measurements tools in China, so we may never know how many viewers actually tuned in. But the power of big numbers (300 million is about the total population of the U.S.) suggests that the potential audience in China today for the game could have rivaled that in the U.S.

That's why Major League Baseball is so eager to create a taste for the sport here. They do the math, just like every other western brand, and calculate the huge upside in potential viewers, participants and future players if their marketing efforts succeed. And even though only 4 million people in China now play baseball, the game's marketers have their sights set on duplicating the success of the NBA, which claims 100 times as many people in China play that sport.

The cultural obstacles of creating a nation of baseball fans will be substantial, of course. It's worthwhile to read a delightful op-ed by Matt Forney that appeared in the New York Times in 2008 following a spring training game played in Beijing. The headline serves up the gist of the piece: "Major League Baseball Arrives in China, but Traditions Don’t Quite Translate"

But while the MLB may be years behind the NBA, it is still investing and trying to catch up. This September, it will open a developmental center in Wuxi, near Shanghai, that it imagines will eventually tip the scales in its favor. The facility will provide professional baseball training for talented middle- and high-school players and serve as a baseball boarding school, where small groups of players will attend academic classes while they learn the finer points of hitting the cut-off man and hitting the curveball. The hope is that these kids will fill the future ranks of China's national teams, seed the start of a professional league in China and ignite a mania for a sport that the world has long linked to American culture. (Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet?)

Jim Small, the MLB's vice president for Asia, likes to note that China was the first place in Asia where baseball was played.  He told The China Daily recently:

"Bangqiu, the Chinese word for baseball, which literally means “stick ball”, can trace its roots in the country to at least 1863, when the Shanghai Baseball Club was formed by an American medical missionary named Henry William Boone. Studies say baseball virtually disappeared in China with the commencement of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when Red Army cadres attacked all sports as an “unwanted extravagance” of Western decadence.  Baseball coaches were ridiculed and persecuted, and some were killed." (Sounds like what New York fans do when their teams lose.)

But now, baseball is back. The Chinese government has even paid to move the dormant Wukesong baseball field, which was used for the 2008 Olympic Games and then dismantled, to Xiamen in Fujian province. The stated reason for the move south was the government's interest in promoting future baseball games in the facility between China and Taiwan (who says the world has not changed). Is this the potential Yankees-Red Sox rivalry of Asia if MLB marketers play things right?

When the 2009 World Series trophy was toured in China earlier this year, small, but enthusiastic crowds led Randy Levine, the general manager of the world champion Yankees, to imagine the future: “The dream of kids all over the world is to play in Yankee Stadium," he said. "One day that will be a Chinese kid’s dream.”

For me, waking up today and knowing that the All Star game was live on TV here wasn't quite a dream come true, but it was enough to get me happily through a summer day in Beijing, made even sweeter when the National League pulled off the win.