What's it like to play in a major baseball tournament in another country? Originally answered on Nov. 24th, 2015
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Answer by Justin Gomer, Ph.D, Lecturer, American Studies, UC Berkeley, on Quora:
As an 11-year old in the mid-1990s I was a member of an all-star baseball team that played a handful of games in Guangzhou, the capitol of the Guangdong province in southern China.
I'm not exactly sure who put the whole thing together, whether youth baseball officials in China contacted folks over here, or vice-versa, but somehow Little League officials in Orange County, including a coach in my local Little League, were tasked with assembling a team of eleven year olds to play on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
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We spent two weeks in Guangzhou, playing a series of games against Chinese youth teams. Most of the teams were made up of players our age, but at least one had players three years older. In terms of competition, we beat the teams our age fairly easily, but struggled against the older team(s) (the difference between eleven year olds and fourteen year olds is enormous when it comes to speed and athleticism).
Aside from the humidity, the games themselves were fairly similar to what we were used to in the U.S., with a few exceptions, most notably the pitching. The first field we played on had an artificial pitcher's mound (there's a metaphor for China's ascent in the global economy in here somewhere!). I had never pitched on an artificial mound and was tapped as the "lucky" starting pitcher that game. It proved...uh...difficult. The mound was basically a huge egg-shaped piece of fiber glass upholstered with AstroTurf with a rubber slab screwed into the top. It looked like the inspiration for Lady Gaga's red-carpet entrance to the Grammy Awards fifteen years later. And it was on wheels, as in the coaches wheeled it out before the first inning. Without any dirt in front of the rubber it was impossible to dig a hole to drive my back foot off of. The angle of the mound was also significantly steeper than any I've ever pitched from. This made keeping the ball down incredibly difficult because my front foot would stay in the air too long as it traveled from the top of my leg kick down toward the bottom of the mound. I think I ended up pitching exclusively from the stretch and took super-short strides in order to keep the ball in the strike-zone.
Then, when we played the older team(s), the mound was about ten feet further from home plate than we were accustomed to. Lucky me got to pitch again! I felt like I was pitching from center-field and I practically had to crow-hop to get the ball over home plate.
The coolest thing about the trip was all of the cultural edification our Chinese handlers arranged for us. The one that remains most vividly in my memory was our visit to a Taoist site that had beautiful gardens and pagodas. The vivid yellow and smell of the incense we lit remains in my head to this day.
My only regret from the experience was that I was too young to appreciate all of the opportunities the trip provided. Most nights, for example, we ate formal dinners hosted by a variety of government officials and dignitaries. The spread of food was unlike anything I've seen since. On multiple occasions servers brought out whole suckling pigs with an apple in its mouth. These events were elaborate dinners of expensive food and delicacies I'd love to eat today. But as a picky eleven year old American kid everything looked "yucky," so I'd eat little more than a plate of steamed rice and then make my dad buy me dinner from the McDonald's across the street from our hotel on our way back for the night. I didn't appreciate just how much effort our hosts put into impressing us while I was there.
One last memory: my dad was my adult chaperone for the trip. He devoted nearly the entire time we were abroad to finding the right combination of gifts for my mother--an elegant porcelain vase for her armoire and fancy pearl earrings. By our last night he'd assembled an impressive haul for mom. Then, during our last dinner, on the eve of our departure back to the U.S., our hosts presented us with a gift bag that included an, you guessed it, ornate porcelain vase. So today, if you visit my parent's home, you'll see two similarly sized Chinese vases.