BEIJING -- He wore a black baseball cap and the wide eyes of a kid about to watch something exciting for the first time. He could have been a boy in a baseball stadium anywhere in America.
Zhang Xu Deng, 12, looked at me quizzically. "See that man wearing white?" he asked, speaking through an interpreter. Zhang pointed at Dodgers right fielder Matt Kemp, placidly warming up in the outfield. "Why is that man wearing white standing there throwing the ball to that other man? Does he always just stand there, or can he use his stick to hit the ball?"
In a bandbox Olympic stadium, the Dodgers were about to play an exhibition game against the San Diego Padres. This would be the first major league game ever played in China. It would also be the first game, proper rules and all, that Zhang and his group of friends would ever see.
In large part, baseball came to Beijing to gather up kids like Zhang. Get enough kids in mainland China to dream big about baseball and soon, Bud Selig hopes, masses of them will become eager consumers of all things major league. As always, it's about money.
I purposely chose to veer from this on Saturday. After getting barraged by the feckless cast of Clemens, Congress and Selig all winter, I needed the break. Sitting in a stadium in a foreign land, watching baseball with a hardscrabble group of kids from a school on the outskirts of Beijing, led me to something I needed to remember: Baseball still has magic.
The first pitch came.
Zhang didn't see it. None of his friends did either.
They'd never heard of a first pitch.
Besides, when it came, Zhang was too busy trying to get more information from me on Matt Kemp. "What is the name of the man wearing the white suit?" he asked, referring to Kemp's white uniform. "Is he the best? Should I root for him or number 25?"
Through my interpreter, Julie Zhang, I told him that Matt Kemp was very good. Kemp does more than just catch the ball, I said, he can also hit the ball very hard. "Number 27 is very strong!" he gushed. "Number 27 hits the ball with the stick and is very good!"
Beautiful.
The first inning ended. Then the second. Zhang and his friends happily told me that they would play their first game today. They swore they weren't nervous.
