How Chinese baseball hit a home run in America, with hopes of hitting the big league at home and away
- The AirHogs were a small-time professional team of ex-minor and formerly major-league players in the North Texas city of Grand Prairie. Then some of China’s rising baseball stars arrived
No one knows the Texas AirHogs quite like Larry Green. Over the team’s 11 seasons playing baseball, the 61-year-old has missed only five of their home games in the Texan city of Grand Prairie. On summer nights, Green pilots his electric wheelchair to his perch on the concrete concourse behind home plate, where he cheers wildly, grumbles about how modern players spend too much time trying to hit home runs, and hollers invective at the home-plate umpire.
“That’s my big excitement,” Green says, taking a break between loudly questioning strike calls on an early August night. “That and trying to get these players to run out ground balls.”
The Texas AirHogs are members of the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball, a federation of 12, mostly Midwestern, teams unaffiliated with Major League Baseball. Inning breaks are punctuated with water-balloon-toss competitions and mascot races.
Admission starts at US$8 for adults, parking is free and convenient, and season-ticket holders like Green and his roommate, Sharen Norton, get treated like big-shots. The AirHogs’ general manager, J.T. Onyett, visits the pair every game and sometimes offers up the VIP amenities.
When the temperature crept to 43 degrees Celsius this summer, the AirHogs’ staff ushered Green, Norton and a few of their friends up to a vacant air-conditioned luxury suite. “I love the Rangers,” Norton, a 62-year-old grandmother, says of one of Texas’ two Major League teams. “But would they do that?”
Almost everything about the AirHogs’ existence feels folksy and draped in Americana. So it came as a surprise to the team’s small group of season-ticket holders when, at a meet-and-greet before the start of the season, Onyett told them that their little hometown club would be undergoing an experiment. Instead of fielding a typical American Association team of fringe prospects, has-been minor leaguers and guys trying for one last shot at the big time, the 2018 AirHogs would, in effect, lease out most their roster to players from the Chinese national baseball team. Ten non-Chinese pros would supplement the national team squad, acting as on-field ringers and off-field mentors.
