China Daily Global Edition (USA)
The time of year for the boys of summer
When will the boys of summer take the field in earnest?
“Boys of summer” colloquially refers to baseball players, having first been associated with a 1972 Roger Kahn book of the same name about the Brooklyn Dodgers. Now to wish for the “American pastime” to become more popular in China is perhaps a tough sell on its surface, whether natural grass or Astroturf. And it is far more fanatically followed in places like Cuba, Panama and the Dominican Republic, so it might even be more aptly called: “The Americas pastime”.
But for the sake of clarity, we’ll stick to sabermetrics scripture and assume that the nine-inning game was invented by Abner Doubleday, who is generally credited with the feat in 1835. The native New Yorker had two historic firsts, as it turns out, thus making his surname all the more prophetic. Not only did he throw out the first ever baseball pitch, in a manner of speaking, but he also likely fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter, South Carolina, at the beginning of the American Civil War (yes, he fought for the good guys).
With a sport so deeply steeped in US culture for nearly two centuries now, why should anyone think the nine-onnine contest should take root halfway across the world in China? The fact is, it has, and continues to grow in popularity, albeit in fits and starts — like a runner faking a steal of second, or a pitcher with a rhythm-rattling giddyup in his delivery like Japan’s Daisuke Matsuzaka (Dice-K) of Boston Red Sox fame or Mexico’s Fernando Valenzuela with his heavens-staring submariner screwball in La La Land.
You probably noticed that neither of these famous Major League Baseball players are American. In fact, the game has become so international over the years that English is often the second or third language of much of the global talent gracing MLB clubhouses these days.
And the sport itself has spread far and wide from its historical geographic origins in the sleepy town of Cooperstown, New York.
As mentioned, it enjoys a wildly popular reputation in much of Latin America, especially Cuba, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Panama. And it has definitely filled stadiums in both the Republic of Korea and Japan over the past few decades. Therefore, China is potentially a field of dreams in terms of the sport’s future growth potential.
Here’s a quick timeline of baseball’s history in China over the past generation or so. In 1976, Hong Kong organized a baseball league with all Chinese players, and a decade later, under the guidance of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a baseball stadium was built in Tianjin. Just two years later, China held its first Little League championship for 11-12 year-old lil’ sluggers. Then in 1996, Japanese pro baseball clubs the Nagoya Chunichi Dragons and the Kobe Orix Buffaloes played exhibition games on Chinese soil, further igniting love for the game here.
To get in the baseball spirit to write this piece, I watched an old music video from 1984: Boys of Summer sung by former Eagle Don Henley. I was just a schoolboy at the time but was surprised to see that there isn’t a single reference to baseball in the song, or video. Yet I had always associated this beautiful ballad with pitchers, catchers and the smell of Hebrew National wieners, while the song seems to be more about lost love and squandered youth.
Funny how memory can evolve over time. Perhaps French writer Marcel Proust should have emphasized the importance of the aural over the olfactory in his modernist 1913 classic Remembrance of Things Past. After all, the sense of hearing is thought to develop slightly before smell in the human embryo.
The book sometimes turns off literature buffs for its 4,215 pages. Kinda like a summer doubleheader with both games heading to extra frames.
But the China Baseball League, now celebrating its 20-year anniversary after morphing into the China National Baseball League, is hoping more local talent become “boys of summer” in their own right, because pitching and batting skills often see their most fecund phase of development in grade school.