Ray Chang didn’t start out with the Cincinnati Reds organization. He signed with the San Diego Padres as a non-drafted free agent in 2005. Chang moved onto the Pittsburgh organization in 2008 before playing with Boston in 2010, then Minnesota from 2011-2012.
A coach's voice in an unmistakably American accent rings out across a baseball field: "Attaboy, good job Wayne, nice throw!"
It could easily be California or Florida, but this is a world away in Nanjing and Major League Baseball is hunting for its first star from China.
If -- or more likely when -- that happens, he will probably come from here.
SARASOTA, Fla. -- The noontime sun blazes relentlessly as players from the rookie-level Gulf Coast League affiliates of the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox engage in pregame stretching and throwing. Each player has the same career goal, but the one wearing the No. 21 jersey for the Orioles undoubtedly has the most intriguing background. He's the only one wearing a microphone with a documentary crew following him. He's the only one who answers to a cartoonish nickname. He's the only one who received worldwide attention simply by signing his name on a contract....
China's most advanced baseball player is taking indoor batting practice....
The documentary film crew noticed it the first day that Orioles’ prospect Xu Guiyuan arrived at the Buck O’Neil spring training complex from China: He was speaking multiple languages.
Xu Guiyuan is seated on the foot of the bed in his cramped hotel room answering my interview questions. The Orioles prospect is switching between English and Mandarin, seeking a comfort level.
"Now you’re locked in,” the batting practice pitcher shouted to Xu Guiyuan, who stood in at the plate on a sunny, windy Wednesday afternoon less than nine hours after the Orioles’ prospect from China arrived at his spring training hotel in the middle of the night.
Let’s talk about the 75 bats that Xu Guiyuan shattered at one of the three Major League Baseball developmental centers in China. That’s a lot of smashed lumber....
There is a certain lore about talented but undeveloped baseball players discovered in faraway locales....
When he was 14, Xu Guiyuan had to make a grown-up decision — whether to leave his family in southeastern China and move more than 900 miles away to an academy run by Major League Baseball to learn a sport his country is all but indifferent to....
Deeming baseball a "bourgeois indulgence for the rich," Mao Zedong, China's longtime communist leader, banned the game in 1966 during his Cultural Revolution....