And according to the Chinese Baseball Association, 4 million Chinese currently play the game.

I'm no expert on the subject, but I've lived in China for quite some time, speak and read the language, so I'll bite. I think the 4 million number is vastly exaggerated, to the point of being absolutely laughable. I've yet to meet somebody from mainland China who knows anything at all about baseball. I've yet to even see a Chinese media report on baseball. Remember the MLB exhibition game played in Beijing about a year and a half ago? I was in China then, and found absolutely no coverage whatsoever, not even a blurb on a news website.

I may be overly skeptical, but I am convinced that MLB would be better off investing this money elsewhere. The Korean and Taiwanese leagues could sure stand some further development, and I believe there is a better chance of a payoff in the end. The journalists who write these articles ignore the fact that basketball remained popular in China throughout the Communist revolution and the Cultural Revolution (for example, soldiers play basketball while on break in the mid-1960s movie The Story of Lei Feng), and did not suddenly become popular with Yao Ming. I seriously doubt baseball will gain a following in China within the next 50 years.

I think the 4 million number is vastly exaggerated

4 million is not a very large number for China, though. With a population of around 1,330,000,000, we are talking about 0.3% of the population. That's a pretty small niche.

I'm not skeptical of this at all. Little league baseball is absolutely huge in both Taiwan and China, in part because any international athletic competition that the Chinese can be competitive/dominant in is huge. Just from the perspectives voiced by my own relatives, football and basketball are sports too dependent on size and strength, but baseball, a sport that demands the finer skills that go along with hitting and pitching, is about as level a playing field as you'll find.

Interesting article. I liked this section:

Most came to the school with less than a year of experience. One boy, Qian Yichen, 13, from Wuxi, had never played the game before.

"It looked so strange, a bunch of people waving a stick around, all chasing such a little ball," says Qian, who was largely recruited for his lineage of two high-level-athlete parents taller than 6 feet.

His father, Qian Anjun, proudly boasts of his son's inexperience: "He is like the pure, whitest paper on which the Americans can draw their masterpiece."


I do think they're going about it wrong if they only have 16 kids at this academy. Find major league prospects is more of a volume business since the odds of any individual player reaching the ML level (or even the MiL level) is so low.

I'm with 1. I live here and I see lots of football and basketball fans, but I've never seen anyone play or even watch a baseball game.

#3: Little League baseball has been popular in Taiwan for decades, due (I believe) mostly to Japanese influence. I don't doubt that baseball is a sport with a more level playing field across varying sizes and strengths. I do, however, stand by the history I referenced above.

If there are 4 million people playing baseball in China, you'd figure most of them would be in the larger cities. I've lived in larger Chinese cities and have never seen even as much as a reference to baseball. 4 million may just be a drop in the hat among the Chinese population, but there aren't 1.3 billion Chinese people living in major cities, and they sure as hell aren't introducing baseball to the impoverished countryside. Basically, if there were 4 million people interested in baseball in China, somebody would come across one once in a while.

A former classmate told me he met a starting player on China's 2008 Olympic baseball team on an airplane one day. The kid told him that he only played baseball because his grades were poor and his parents wanted to find something with a possible future. I didn't meet the kid myself, but I highly doubt he's even cognizant of anything on the international baseball scene.

Someone must be playing baseball in China, they beat Taiwan in the WBC last year and only lost to Japan 4-0.

EDIT: And as far as I can tell, they were emplying actual Chinese players, not the Nick Punto/Francisco Cervelli Italians.