America’s baseball moguls hope to follow basketball’s lead in China

IN A few days America’s pitchers and catchers are due to report for spring training. So you would expect the managers of the New York Yankees, the “world” champions (meaning winners of America’s main tournament), to be in America frantically trying to plug holes in the team’s line-up or, at the very least, subverting similar efforts by their arch-rivals, the Boston Red Sox. Instead, the team’s president, Randy Levine, and general manager, Brian Cashman, are busy with a much trickier task: hauling the championship trophy around China in the hope of drumming up interest in a country that views a baseball as something to be manufactured and sold (which it does by the million), rather than thrown and hit (which it barely does at all).

Somewhere in China, reasons Mr Cashman, there is a kid who can throw a baseball at 98mph (158kph). Find him, turn him into a star and he will awaken a nation of fans. He points to the spectacular commercial success of America’s National Basketball Association (NBA) in China after the recruitment of the seven-and-a-half-foot Yao Ming, from Shanghai, to the Houston Rockets, whose jerseys are a ubiquitous presence on the backs of Chinese children. …