Baseball finds its charm in China

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.

The kids have zeal and guts, but they also have a long way to go. Major League Baseball has helped provide equipment and instruction for kids in Beijing and several other Chinese cities. That’s how Zhang and his friends got started. For now, they practice on a small, dirt field, often by swatting a rubbery ball with their hands. Together, the kids and their coaches are still trying to figure things out. As the game began, the kids thought an outfield was patrolled by four players. They weren’t clear on whether or not three strikes make an out.

Ming Ming Li, 11, sat to Zhang’s right, wearing the same black cap. He was chubby, short and engaging. I guessed he was a catcher. He told me I was right. Suddenly, a Padres player walked from the outfield, tossed a ball into the stands, and Ming Ming caught it. Now Ming Ming was a hero too. As the boys examined the ball’s stitching and letters, he doled out advice. “For the ball to come, when the man in the beige uniform goes by,” he told the others, “you have to wave and shout, Aahhh! Aahhh! Aahhh!”

The boys shouted: “Aahhh! Aahhh! Aahhh!”

It didn’t help. But they kept shouting.

When they finished, they held animated conversations about Matt Kemp and munched on hot dogs.

The Dodgers had hit a home run. They led, 1-0. The interpreter asked about the score and one of the boys said it was 2-2.

No, no, scolded Zhang, the lead has changed hands many times and it is much more than four scores. I had to explain that foul balls were not home runs.

Ming Ming, for one, didn’t seem to care about the score. He looked out at the stadium, roughly 12,000 on hand, and told me he’d never seen so many people and never seen a field so big and green. It was spectacular. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the grass was actually in terrible shape but had been spray painted green just days before the game.

A coach came over and gushed to me about Zhang, who has the wispy beginnings of a mustache and the lanky limbs of a sprinter. He said Zhang is the best player on the Bai Pen Yao primary school team, by far.

Zhang looked at me and smiled.

The coach said nothing about Ming Ming.

But Ming Ming looked at me and smiled too.

I noticed he kept the ball he’d caught under his left leg. Every so often he picked it up and stared at it in disbelief.

The game wore on. From the speakers, Jay-Z and Sheryl Crow blared. The Dodgers led, 2-1, by now and it was freezing.

The boys hardly noticed the cold, or the score. Zhang and Ming Ming were in awe of an All-American invention: The Wave. They whooped as loudly as they could when it was their turn to stand. Of another slice of Americana -- cheerleaders, yes, at a baseball game -- they simply stared.

The seventh inning arrived. When the game started, the boys had not known who the Los Angeles Dodgers were. Now, all they really cared about was Matt Kemp. “Is that him?” Zhang kept asking me. “Is that number 27?”

When Kemp flied out, Zhang slumped in his chair.

By the eighth inning Zhang huddled near his coaches, his back to the action. Ming Ming shared chips and talked with another boy. They hardly looked at the field. They’d lost their focus and now just wanted to hang out. I thought of how this is part of baseball too: the way games are more than games. For a lot of us, going to a ballpark is a social event wrapped around a game. The kids looked like fans you see all the time at Dodger Stadium.

They even left like fans in Los Angeles, filing out before the game was over to beat the ugly traffic.

We walked to the exit. Ming Ming tightly clutched his baseball. Zhang spoke in awe of Matt Kemp. All of the boys vowed to win their first game, vowed to keep playing until they were good. They knew nothing of baseball’s dark side. They were nothing but a happy bunch.

If only baseball could always be this sweet.

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Kurt Streeter can be reached at kurt.streeter@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Streeter, go to latimes.com/streeter.