Saturday’s game between the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers in Beijing shows that Major League Baseball is smart enough to spot a market. But it needs Chinese players to get fans in the country of 1.3 billion inspired.
A check of the Baseball Almanac shows how many MLB players since 1914 have been born in China: 1
And that was in 1914 for a total of 1 year.
How important is that stat?
An estimated 30 million Chinese watch Houston Rockets games on satellite television, compared to the 12,000 who turned out for MLB’s exhibition game. The Rockets have a single Chinese player: Yao Ming, whose fansite blog sells ad space for AT&T and Circuit City.
I flew from Beijing to San Francisco via Tokyo in 2002 on the same plane with Yao before he continued onward and was introduced that night to fans in Houston. Watching the giant center stand in the U.S. Customs line after getting off the plane is something you never forget. Today you can’t go anywhere in China without seeing Yao’s likeness to sell everything from cellphone service to sneakers.
He’s a phenomenom in China — even if he plays in Texas.
Leave a Reply