Baseball without Borders: The International Pastime

3. China: Silk Gowns and Gold Gloves

3 | China Silk Gowns and Gold Gloves In the spring of , a strange new disease swept through much of Asia. More than people died and nearly , were infected with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or . The fast-spreading sickness caught health experts by surprise. Worried they were on the verge of a worldwide pandemic, officials of the World Health Organization issued a series of unprecedented warnings against travel to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and large parts of mainland China. Later, Toronto was added to the list of places to avoid. Fears that traveling athletes would circulate the disease forced organizers to cancel or move scores of international sporting events, including the women’s World Cup soccer tournament in China and the badminton world championships in Birmingham , England. By midsummer was in check, and the travel warnings were gradually lifted. Quarantine precautions were eased, and tourism agencies across the globe were touting the wonders of visiting exotic Asia again. The surest sign of a return to normalcy came when twenty-five-year-old catcher Ren Min of the Tianjin Lions took the field at his home stadium for the first Chinese Baseball League All-Star Game. Tianjin was a military fortress during the Yuan Dynasty in the fourteenth century and today is one of China’s biggest industrial and port cities. It is the closest seaport to the capital, Beijing, and sits astride the Bohai Sea. Tianjin also long has been a hotbed of baseball in China. In , when Deng Xiaoping was in the early days of reopening his nation to the West after decades of isolation and internal turmoil, ฀ ฀ ฀฀ ฀ ฀ Los Angeles Dodgers president Peter O’Malley wanted to make a gesture of friendship from the people of the United States. He did it by financing the construction of a baseball stadium in Tianjin. Nearly two decades later Tianjin was one of four cities chosen to field teams in China’s first professional baseball league. The simply named Chinese Baseball League ( ) was established with the blessing of China ’s top governmental leaders, who announced unabashedly that their goal was to upgrade the quality of baseball to make “a historical breakthrough at the Olympic Games in Beijing.”1 The Tianjin Lions, Beijing Tigers, Shanghai Eagles, and Guangzhou Leopards played a five-week, trial-run season in April and May , with Tianjin defeating Beijing – in the championship game. The next spring, the league was settling into its first full, four-month season when hit and panicked authorities imposed severe restrictions on travel and public gatherings. Baseball in China seemed to be the last thing on anyone’s mind, and it may have been for a few frightening weeks as spread out of control. But as soon as the international medical community seemed to get the spread of the sickness under control, China’s top leaders looked to the game long hailed as “America’s pastime” to send an important political signal to the rest of the world. The first public event they allowed after months of -imposed quarantine was the first Chinese Baseball League All-Star Game at Dodger Stadium. Baseball has a long, mostly forgotten history in China, spanning all of one century and parts of two other centuries. The sport was played at the Shanghai Base Ball Club as early as —more than a decade before the first game in Japan. It was instrumental in bringing a premature end to one of the most ambitious educational exchanges of all time in the late nineteenth century. University baseball clubs served as a cover to help Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionaries overthrow the Chinese emperor , and the game was hailed by generals of the People’s Liberation Army who claimed it helped their soldiers learn how to throw hand grenades. Baseball was played in prisoner-of-war camps across China during the ghastly Sino-Japanese War and was a passionate diversion for Gen. Claire L. Chenault’s Flying Tigers during breaks in their spectacular job providing air cover for the Burma Road and protecting the city of Chongqing when it was the capital of China. Chinese players fielded : Silk Gowns and Gold Gloves teams in secret in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and, when the chaos finally ended, became regulars in international tournaments across Asia. Time and again, from the late-nineteenth century to the early years of the third millennium, China played an important role in the globalization of baseball...