Spring is here, and so is a brand new fucked up situation. I don’t really have anything to say on the topic of a crashing global economy, so it feels like a good time to talk about baseball.
Not Major League Baseball. The only thing worth mentioning is the absolute debacle that the Athletics-should-still-be-in-Oakland’s first homestand was. I feel badly for the players, who certainly deserve better, but Fuck John Fisher and the rest of the greed-heads in the ear with a broken bat.
As proclaimed here previously, my brother and I no longer give MLB any attention, but we still love the game of baseball. What to do? Minor league teams are still MLB-affiliated, so that’s a non-starter. We considered picking a Japanese or Korean team to root for, but without any connection to either country we’d be choosing our team based on something silly like logos and color schemes.
Then we mused: Is there baseball in China? Our ancestral hometown is a little ways up the Yangtze River from Shanghai in Jiangsu province, a bustling industrial and commercial hub called Wuxi. To our delight, we learned that the Jiangsu Huge Horses–not a mistranslation–play their home games in Wuxi, and not only that, but they just happen to have the most badass logo and color scheme in the entire China Baseball League. What’s more is they are the defending league champions!
Baseball is NOT big in China. “Members of a diverse and growing community of local baseball enthusiasts came out in force to catch the excitement and support Wuxi’s baseball team, the Jiangsu Huge Horses,” writes Brad Johnson for a news article on Wuxi’s city website. The Huge Horses won that game against the Shandong Blue Whales 13-2, in front of “a crowd of more than a hundred hometown fans.” (Sort of sounds like an A’s game…) There’s currently a big push to grow the sport of baseball in China, and there is a long way to go.
We wanted to proudly display our fandom, but of course there is no team store, no “merch,” not even knock-offs on Temu, because nobody watches Chinese baseball. I figured this Brad Johnson guy just might be an American living in China, so I found his email and sent a plea, including all of the backstory about the A’s. He replied within a few hours, saying he’d shown the manager of the Huge Horses my email. The manager was delighted, and they put together a box of awesome swag for us.
Brad also mentioned one of the star players for Jiangsu, #51 Zhu Xudong, AKA Xiao (Little) Dong, and invited us to join his fan club. Huge Horses, Little Dong. Fantastic.
As a matter of fact, Zhu is on the China National Baseball Team. Brad turned us on to a tournament in Tucson that they’d be playing at, a qualifying tournament for the World Baseball Classic. A chance to see our hometown hero in action! In the flesh!
I’ll tell ya all about that one next time.
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