Shanghai Eagles Baseball!

Baseball is the only sport I care about, and honestly I don't care all that much. Every year here I've briefly considered signing up for the online baseball channel MLB.TV, but I've never really gotten around to it. I keep remembering that I didn't even bother to plug in the rabbit ears of my TV when I lived in Oakland - they were purely ornamental.

However I at least understand the basic rules and points of strategy, which is more than I can say for soccer. So after reading about the free baseball games in Eastern Shanghai on Micah Sittig's short article, I decided to head over to the stadium and catch a free game.

It's not quite as easy to get there as the article would suggest - yes, it's an easy ride on a brand-new subway line to Gaoke Road Station. And as a sideline, I was very impressed with the tranfer station, it didn't require a ten minute hike like a lot of other Shanghai transfer points.

However, it dropped me off in the middle of god-knows-what. I wrote down simple directions off a map before leaving my apartment, they had me walking through a weird desolate area with a lot of construction going on, as shown to the left. I instead asked a policeman that happened to be nearby, he told me to walk down Gaoke Road, make a right on Dongming Road, and then another right on Yunlian Road. It's about a ten or fifteen minute walk, located in a larger Sports complex much like the one the Shanghai Sharks play in.

There's a Kedi Convenience Store along Dongming Road, it's important to stock up on supplies here because the stadium doesn't sell anything. Not peanuts, not cracker jacks, no baseball hats, no jerseys, no foam "#1" fingers. Not even water or beer, although most of the fans were sporting 22s of Malt Liquor (no really). It seems kind of nonsensical until you see the stadium:



It's a very small stadium, even without considering that those red and white flags limit most of the stadium off limits to fans. It was maybe a hundred or so people in the stands, all either players, foreigners, or their friends. It also ended up raining really hard. It didn't stop the game but it explains the umbrellas out in force.

The small size and the low-key feel gave the whole affair the feeling of a high-school game. I have to admit, this extended to the level of play. I saw one of the ugliest plays I've ever seen at any level. The man on first was caught attempting to steal by a pitch out. The catcher made a pretty good throw to second base, but the throw got past the tag, past the second baseman backing him up, and then past the center fielder. Also, the pitcher for the Shanghai Eagles threw entirely fastballs down the center of the plate - looking at the teammate tracing him on the speed gun, all the pitches were in the 70s. Wow.



The pitcher for Tianjin threw sidearm, with pretty good movement. I was a little surprised throughout the game, there were several players with strange batting stances and the like. But really there wasn't much that different to the baseball I'm used to, aside from the Tianjin team bowing to the Umpire before stepping into the batting box - the Shanghai team didn't. I remember this from watching a Japanese baseball game once - maybe they have a Japanese coach or something. Oh, also the teams had a group huddle before starting their half of the inning.




The Shanghai Team had numbers and Chinese-character names on their uniforms, strangely enough Tianjin didn't have any easy way to identify who was who. Anyway for those with an interest, here's a copy of the team's lineup. It was given to me by the team's mascot, on the right. Players are as young as 16, and as old as 36, with most in their 20s.

All in all the game was fun if extremely casual, I'd recommend it. The league has a split season, from April 11th to May 11th, and then from September 5th to September 14th, with a playoff from September 20th to October 12th. Unless Shanghai gets into the playoffs, they will only host games for the first part of the season. Games are listed on Upcoming.org - to make it easy, the only regular-season home games left are May 2nd and 3rd at 2:30, or May 4th at 9:30 am.

A Shanghai Gymnastics Tournament

A couple weeks ago I went with a group of friends to a Gymnastics tournament in Shanghai. That's an amazingly dry way to start a posting, but I ended up really enjoying the event and thought I'd post a few quick pictures.

The event took place at an indoor sports stadium near Zhongshan park, a five or ten minute walk south of the subway exit. I'd been there before, because the grounds are part of a larger sport complex and also have a bunch of badminton and ping-pong courts to rent - the badminton courts rent at about five dollars an hour. Badminton is a serious competitive sport in Shanghai, I'll have more to say about it later. Anyway the stadium itself is pretty large, although it doesn't have all that much space for fans - the seating on the side isn't all that much more than at the ends, so I'll guess it could fit about a couple thousand people at most. There's a girl on the balance beam, in the foreground.



I'm not one to watch gymnastics on TV, and I don't think I've paid attention to the Olympics since the one in Barcelona. Still I have to say I was wildly impressed. What they were doing looked indescribably fun, and they were doing it so well. My sister likes trampolines enough to put it on her wedding registration, any good person could have some fun bouncing around on one, but amateurs could never dream of going twenty-five feet in the air, doing triple flips:



The physiques were amazing. Men and women gynmasts were generally short, with amazing musculature. Of course it translated into moves that seemed unhuman - the effect was definitely magnified by seeing it from a rather close distance, in real life instead of on TV. Particularly on the women's balance beams, with the short bursts of intense motion that just as suddenly stop, I couldn't believe what I saw them do. Check out this girl's legs, they seem more muscle than not:



In addition to being able to see the athletes up close, it was also interesting to see what went along with it - the girl gymnasts went into the stands after their event, and acted like basic annoying, giggly teenagers, cheering on the men's events. Professional cameramen and photographers were everywhere, both on the floors and in the stands, clicking down on the entire performance (they generally lasted a couple minutes apiece). And the athletes and the coaches also had to stretch out for each event, get over their jitters, and just get their equipment set up.



Overshadowing the event was that a female gymnast, a week earlier at the same event, took a bad fall and went into a coma. Initial guesses were at life-long paralysis, although her prognosis has since improved.

Shanghai Sharks Basketball

The Sharks are Shanghai's professional basketball team, in the CBA league - the Chinese Basketball Association. The obvious reference point is Yao Ming, who was a star on the team, and still has a massive following in China - usually if I talk to a stranger my age, they'll mention Yao Ming within the first 30 seconds of conversation. Maybe my height gets them thinking about basketball?

Supposedly the Sharks were popular when he was on the team, but the Sharks aren't really that good a team, and the CBA is criticized as being a farm league for the NBA. The criticism seems off to me, as only two players have ever moved from the CBA to the NBA.

My first visit to the stadium was a little weird. If not a very convenient location, it is pretty much in the geographical center of Shanghai. It's part of a very large sports complex, with professional-grade tracks and so forth. I've heard Shanghai's athletes all live in on-site dormitories and train here, something like a Communist-style work group. Not just basketball playerys, but gymnasts, swimmers, fencers, and so on. The complex is big and modern, weirdly enough there's also a large Japanese-branded superstore underneath the main gym.



I didn't go to many Warriors games when I lived in Oakland (who can blame me?), but I don't remember the teams lining up beforehand to shake hands. The red team here is the evil Shandong Bulls.



Another difference was they didn't play the American National Anthem. It was the first time I had heard the Chinese Anthem, everybody stood up and all that. It was a recording of a choir, rather than a live singer. It sounds something like Wagner to me, a little strange.

A look at the game! There's a few small differences between the court and the NBA, I'm guessing it goes by the international standards court. The 3-point line is elliptical, without the side lines, and the lanes are substantially wider at the base.



That serves to discourage an inside game, and I was reminded of pick-up games in Oakland Chinatown - teams of 5 guards! It's a lot of ten or fifteen foot shooters, or people cutting inside for the lay-up. There were also a lot of set plays that involved driving inside and flipping it out for a jumper. Here's somebody calling a play.



Very strangely, Shanghai, which ended up winning the game, had five separate players score in the double digits, with two other players reaching eight and nine. With the Bulls, though, a foreign player dominated the game. He was #21, he played less than half the game but was still scored 33 points, the next highest scorer that night scored 21. I'm very curious why he didn't play more, especially considering the team lost. Would it be considered unfair competition, does the team not care about winning? Unfortunately I didn't get a decent picture of him, here's the team's other foreign player:



I wouldn't call the other foreigners outstanding players, but they did go inside from time to time. And to a casual observer like myself, they also seemed to play a lot harder than the Chinese athletes. Sometimes it seemed like the game was just a friendly match, without the players giving it their all.

A hilarious rule about foreign players is, they can only play five quarter's worth of minutes! So the way the Shandong Bulls did it was to double up on foreigners in the fifth quarter. Shanghai probably would have done that, but one of the foreign players got a minor injury, and took the rest of the game off.

The stadium is pretty small, I'm guessing it could hold a few thousand people max, and was probably holding less than a thousand when I was there. Ticket prices were from $2.50 to $20. I just got the cheapest seats, it was fine. The $20 seats area was pretty small, maybe twenty people in a box right next to the court. It was a bunch of white guys, they seemed to follow the league enough to know who to yell at, and were obviously pretty drunk. Check out the tables full of Carlsbergs and Heinekens. I think I took that picture during the first quarter, to boot.



Most of the crowd was Chinese, of course. People seemed pretty into the game and cheering their team on, although not as much as in the Bay Area, which isn't exactly sports-fanatic capital. It's hard to compare given the smaller crowd and stadium, though. Noisy balloons were passed out (slapping them together gives a clapping sound), but they weren't as loud as the ones from Oakland A's games. There's also a guy there with a snare drum, a few people brought them in.



And of course I'll mention the cheerleaders. They were a bunch of high-school girls, with baby fat and all.



They danced a couple times, it was the same dance every time! There were also a couple girls dressed up as the Sharks mascot, they left the ponytail hanging out though. For the most part they just cheered on the sidelines, they were silly and acted more like a bunch of high-school girls than cheerleaders. They razzed on the people shooting free throws, a couple times the referee had to tell them to cool it down. Most of them were wearing thick yellow jackets during the game, it was too cold for a skirt and tube-top!



A few surprises on commercial aspects: I wanted to get dinner at the stadium, but all they had was drinks and candy, so I waited until after the game. I thought the Shanghai Sharks logo was kind of cool and contemplated getting something branded, but they didn't have anything for sale, there weren't even any bootleg items on sale outside! That was a surprise. Finally, considering Nike, Reebok, and Adidas have NBA-themed advertisements all around Shanghai, it was kind of surprising that none of these companies advertised with the Sharks.

Oh! And, as far as I can tell, the CBA doesn't publish their schedule in English, very strange! A Chinese-language schedule is available at the CBA website. It also lists the scores of past games. My favorite is the 149-135 game, I can't even imagine. There's also Chinese-language box scores and a small collection of pictures for this game.

SH magazine, a free English-language weekly guide to Shanghai, frequently lists dates and prices. Every one of these is inaccurate, so be on alert for that if planning to attend.