MLBPA: Take me out to the 棒球比赛

The Major League Baseball Players Association, throwing a curveball at Commissioner Rob Manfred and team owners, announced they will hold spring training – and the regular season if necessary – in China.

“We’re pushing to get our game back into the Olympics,” Tony Clark, executive director of the players union, told a news conference, “and with the Beijing Winter Games starting at the same time as our training camps open, what better way to focus attention on what the Olympics have lost?

“I mean, hell, MLB already has a broadcasting deal with Tencent, a Chinese streaming service, so fans can watch our games,” Clark said. “The NBA and China are already doing everything but sleeping in the same bed. Table tennis, too. The NHL played preseason games there. We might as well get in on the action.”

Besides, he added, China’s already taking over Hollywood “and who knows what else in America. Maybe it’s time we start taking over something there.”

Clark said moving spring training and maybe other games to China are only a result of the owners’ Dec. 2 lockout when baseball’s Collective Bargaining Agreement expired.

“Y’know those pitchers who keep rubbing up the ball and going to first over and over, and scratching themselves and picking their nose and ‘Throw the goddamned ball already!’ That’s the owners,” Clark said. “They’re just stalling or jerking us around.”

Baseball was dropped from the Olympic Summer Games in 2012. “Oh, it wouldn’t be an Olympic sport right away,” Clark said. “But the China Baseball League went out of business in 2018 and there are a bunch of empty available ballparks in Beijing and Shanghai and – forgive me if I mispronounce any of these names – Jiangsu, Chengdu, Tianjin, Zhengzhou, Huflungdung, Wingding … Okay, look. The names aren’t important. I’m sure the good people in whatever the hell those cities are called would love to have baseball back,” he said.

“Failing that, we could go to Taiwan – they used to be called China, right? – where their baseball league collapsed 19 years ago. There’s ballparks in Chianan and Taoyuan and Wonton and Kung Pao and Xinzhuang and … Ow, shit! I keep biting my tongue and I think I just cracked a molar.”

He said teams aren’t required to conduct spring training in Arizona and Florida, nor are they wedded to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or anywhere else. “All I’m saying is Mr. Manfred had better get on the stick – preferably the Louisville Slugger he’s got stuck up his ass – or he’s going to be in trouble not just with us but with the billionaire owners who pay his salary.”

Manfred said he has already told union negotiators “that we’ve pulled the reserve clause off the table, so they can still be free agents at some point. We’ve agreed to try and persuade small-market teams from hiding their profits in order to ‘cry poor’ in contract negotiations as long as the players agree to a salary cap. And I told the owners to scrap that business of cavity searches when pitchers complete an inning.”

The commissioner called the MLBPA plan to take spring training to China “ludicrous. You just don’t move our national pastime halfway around the world because you don’t get what you want.” He spoke from an auxiliary conference room at MLB’s New York headquarters while a locksmith worked on reopening his office.

Clark laughed at Manfred’s halfway-around-the-world comment. “Hey, we’ve already got a team in St. Petersburg,” he said, “and it’s only a thousand or so miles farther to Beijing.”