Can Baseball Find its Yao Ming?
Its hard to know if it ever will, but in a country of more than a billion people it seems statistically possible. On the other hand, baseball faces an uphill battle in a country which has embraced basketball and a great many other sports, leaving baseball a fringe sport to say the least — like Rugby in North America, for example. The 2008 Olympics are a great opportunity to raise the profile of the sport in the country, and Jim Lefebvre, one-time manager of the Seattle Mariners, has been hired to manage the National Team. The stakes are high. If they don’t do well enough, there won’t be enough pressure to enforce change at policy levels to introduce baseball as a game to be learned in school. And if kids don’t grow up with the sport, it doesn’t matter how many physically gifted athletes China produces — because few, if any of them, will be interested in baseball.