China Still Sucks at Baseball… and Would Prefer You Didn’t Know
The World Baseball Classic rolls on today without the Small Red Machine, the Chinese national team, eliminated Sunday by Beijing Olympic champs South Korea. The Seoul Men slapped around China in a 14-0 rout that had to be called after the top of the seventh inning in accordance with the WBC’s “mercy rule.” As an aside, my favorite sports commentator Mike Francesa said it best last night on his show Mike’d Up that this mercy rule is a “complete joke” and it makes what could otherwise feel like an elite international tournament, feel like a softball tournament. That being said, if there was ever a team, or a continent for that matter, that needed a mercy rule, it’s China and the rest of Asia. The first reason is that you have teams like Japan and Korea, two legit baseball powerhouses playing meek squads like China and Taiwan, and the probability that you’ll have a 14-0 game is much higher than, say, in a Braves-Marlins series. But these type of blowouts could occur in any of these Classic games — especially when you have Cuba in the same pool as South Africa or the Dominican Republic in the same pool as the Netherlands. Why the Netherlands is in the tournament could be the subject of another post. The major reason the mercy rule suits the Asian teams is that all of these countries bring a higher standard of “honor” to international play and view blowouts as the ultimate embarrassment. For instance, in one of the bigger political grudge matches of the tournament, China beat Taiwan 4-1 on Saturday. One day earlier, Taiwan was shut out by the Koreans 9-0. Following the two losses, Taiwanese legislators have called for sweeping reform to the island’s baseball program. Likewise, while China doesn’t, and shouldn’t, think of itself as a baseball power, losing to Japan, the object of national hatred, doesn’t sit too well with its sports authorities. But unlike Taiwan, whose leaders openly blast its own team, China’s preferred response to its baseball failures is to pretend the tournament never happened. For instance, the top story Sunday on the online version of the China Daily sports page isn’t China’s elimination from the Classic, but rather Manchester United’s English Cup win. Fine, Man U is huge in China, but even if you click on the section of the sports page marked “World Events” or “China,” there is no mention of the World Baseball Classic anywhere on those pages. And if you search China’s state news agency Xinhua for “baseball,” the only hit for the Classic is a story from March 4 on Cuba’s national team. China is pretending that its dismal performance at the Classic never happened. Rest assured, if China had made it through pool play to the next round of the Classic, we’d know about it. China went winless in the inaugural Classic in 2006 and has since attempted to make strides in the development of players in the mainland. But as can be seen from China’s brief appearance in the Classic, I’m not sure the world has anything to worry about.
Image: Bleacher Report
So finally, we have a resolution to the international dispute over two Chinese bronze heads that sold last week as part of Yves Saint Laurent’s estate sale. The statues, that Beijing claims were looted from China nearly 150 years ago by foreign aggressors, were sold to a Chinese bidder Cai Mingchao, who paid $40 million for the two pieces. And then, uh, he refused to to pay. Not that he couldn’t afford the pieces, but rather he made a political statement on behalf of his country, that the stolen goods should be returned to China. Cai told the press, “We have stood up and thankfully I was given this opportunity, which I felt was my responsibility. And what I want to stress, is I will not pay for this bid.” What some art dealers are worried about,
UPDATE 3/4: The saga of the canceled Oasis shows continues… The Guardian published a story today claiming that China’s canning of the two concerts had nothing to do with Tibet, and everything to do with the finance troubles of the concert promoter. This would not explain why the government would shut down the shows, but the guy actually went on the record with Reuters and admitted to being broke. Check out the Guardian story
Nothing sweetens an ongoing cultural property dispute like a little blackmail. As 
Those of you familiar with The Princess Bride probably know the fire swamp scene pretty well. After Westley and Buttercup survive the first two deadly terrors of the fire swamp — the flame spurt and the lightning sand — Westley assures his lady that the third terror, the R.O.U.S.’s (rodents of unusual size), are nothing to worry about because they don’t exist. Then, of course, to all of our surprise, and to the surprise of sick, little Fred Savage and his grandpa, an R.O.U.S. appears and Westley battles the enormous rodent to its death. Well, something sorta similar happened in the city of Fuzhou in South China over the weekend, except he who conquered the rodent was not a good-looking, sword-wielding, giant-defeating hero with a little blond pony-tail. He was a middle-aged Chinese guy named Mr. Xian, who picked up the giant rat after people found it on the street. According to a
For days now, China has protested the sale of two bronze statues on the block at a Christie’s auction this week in Paris. The two bronzes in question were reportedly looted from the Summer Palace in during the Second Opium War in 1860 and ended up in the hands of the late Yves Saint Laurent. The two pieces, a rabbit head and a rat head, were part of a 12-piece collection of all the zodiac signs that China is desperately trying to retrieve. However, Christie’s is not caving to Chinese pressure and plans to go ahead with the sale of the two bronzes, which according to
Well, to be quite honest, this is pretty much the only thing I could read about a Jackie Chan movie that would make me want to see it. You might be tempted to rebut with, “well what if you heard he and Chris Tucker were doing another Rush Hour?” And to that I would say, “nope.” Because for the most part, and I’m sorry to all my friends in Hong Kong for saying this (don’t really have any), but Jackie Chan sucks. I know he’s a Chinese action hero and is really funny when he speaks English and does those Visa ads with Yao Ming, but his movies suck. And he’s 54 years old. That said, Chan’s latest, Shinjuku Incident, coming out in April, is so gory, says director Derek Yee, that he’s not even bothering with a release in the mainland. And that makes me want to see it. According to the