Enjoyable look into the birth of modern Chinese baseball
This documentary covers the four years of preparation of the Chinese national baseball team ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Although baseball had been well-known in China, it died out during the Mao era.
According to the manager of the Chinese team, former US big-leaguer Jim Lefebvre, this wasn't due to any ideological problem with baseball -- just a lack of funding and budgets to keep baseball going in the 1960s and 70s. So China had an earlier baseball culture that had practically died out, and the Chinese turned to MLB in the US for help. MLB sent Lefebve and pitching coach Bruce Hurst, who was later replaced by Steve Ontiveros.
The movie compresses four years into a single hour-long documentary, so there isn't a great level of detail, but it does show clips from a few important games. Against Cuba in Italy three years before the Olympics, where China was absolutely demolished. But there was a bright spot during the same games in Italy, when...
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