Page 8 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
U.S.A.
August 6, 2018
Chinese baseball team takes over Texas minor league club
By Stephen Hawkins
AP Sports Writer
G
RAND PRAIRIE, Texas — The
starting lineups are announced in
English and Spanish at home
games for the independent Texas AirHogs.
And then the Chinese national anthem
is played.
For about 30 members of the Chinese
national baseball team, the suburban
ballpark a few miles west of downtown
Dallas has become their summer home
and training ground in an unprecedented
setup.
They are a revolving part of the roster
for a professional team in the United
States, playing more games and against
tougher competition while working to
improve for future international events
such as the upcoming Asian Games and
2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
“The system that they’ve created here,
where we work out in the morning, we’ve
got weight training, the pitchers have a
system where we throw on, the coaches
have kind of set up a system that’s really
helped them to be able to make the
adjustment to play more games,” Sun
Jianzeng, a 26-year-old right-hander, said
through a translator.
Chinese players who professionally back
home would play only about 20 to 30 games
a season make up about two-thirds of the
expanded roster for the American
Association team now formally known as
the AirHogs powered by Beijing Shougang
Eagles. The players, ranging in age from
18 to 29, rotate on and off the active roster
to play 6 or 7 games per week in one of the
low-minor leagues not affiliated with
Major League Baseball.
“It makes it workable, because we don’t
want to wear these guys down,” said
AirHogs manager John McLaren, a
big-league coach for three decades who has
worked with Chinese teams since 2011.
Players not on the active roster for
games go through early workouts at
AirHogs Stadium, 10 minutes from the
home ballpark of the Texas Rangers.
There are conditioning and weight
training drills that are new to the Chinese
players.
“They’re trying to do something they’ve
never done before, which is play this many
games on a daily basis, and you throw in
the fact that with the exception of maybe
three or four pitchers, they’re physically
and experience-wise overmatched,” said
Larry Hardy, a former Rangers pitching
coach filling the same role for the AirHogs.
“But they’re getting better.”
McLaren had a short stint managing the
Seattle Mariners in 2007-2008 and was
interim manager for three games for the
Washington Nationals in 2011. He was on
the Philadelphia Phillies staff the past two
seasons.
He also managed China at the World
Baseball Classic (WBC) in 2013 and 2017.
Over that time, there would be gaps of six
or seven months when he wouldn’t even
see the team — and players would barely
play baseball. China has a 2-10 record in
its four WBC appearances, getting
outscored 18-102 in those games.
“These guys, I don’t think they’d ever
played twice in a week,” McLaren said.
That changed when the Chinese
Baseball
Association
made
an
arrangement with the AirHogs, allowing
them to focus on daily development.
They are now together all the time in a
12-team league that stretches more than
1,300 miles from Texas into Canada. The
closest stop is Cleburne, Texas, where
53-year-old former big-league slugger
Rafael Palmeiro is starring for the
Railroaders.
China’s only Olympic berth was in 2008,
going 1-6 in group play after an automatic
berth as the host nation. That was the last
time baseball was part of the Summer
Games until its return two years from now
in Japan.
The AirHogs are a league-worst 17-44
this season, but player-coach Na Chuang
said the team has progressed faster than
expected, increasing the confidence of the
Chinese players who will leave with
McLaren and some of their national
coaches for the Asian Games in Indonesia
before the end of the 100-game AirHogs
season.
Kevin Joseph, who pitched in the majors
briefly with the St. Louis Cardinals in
2002, is part of McLaren’s staff as an
UNPRECEDENTED SETUP. Chu Fujia of
China, who plays for the Texas AirHogs, makes con-
tact for a sacrifice bunt during an American Associa-
tion of Independent Professional Baseball game
against the Chicago Dogs in Grand Prairie, Texas.
The small ballpark in Texas just a few miles from
downtown Dallas is home this summer to the Chinese
national baseball team. (AP Photo/Brandon Wade)
assistant coach and invaluable translator.
He learned Mandarin while spending
more than eight years teaching baseball to
young people after a friend with
connections to baseball officials in China
invited him there.
“The big need, I think, for China is they
don’t play a lot of games. So for them to be
able to come, and to learn the rhythm of a
baseball lifestyle, play against better
competition, has been a great experience,”
Joseph said. “The players have really
meshed well with the Chinese guys, they
love them.”
Joseph said hitters have changed the
way they swing the bat, being more
aggressive and ready to hit pitches coming
faster than they’ve seen before.
For the pitchers, the emphasis has been
on throwing more fastballs and fewer
breaking balls. Hardy said the catchers
have started to understand what the
coaches are looking for from pitchers.
“The level of play is a lot higher,”
Jianzeng said. “You can make smallest
mistakes, can be hurt here as a pitcher. ...
Because you’re playing so many games,
you’re learning about yourself as a pitcher,
and you’re getting a lot more experience.”
There are the inevitable hiccups because
of communication issues and culture
differences, including the style of play the
Chinese players were used to, but Joseph
said things have gone well overall.
“It’s fun just to watch them interact with
everybody, and themselves, and show up
every day, kidding and joking,” said
McLaren, sitting in the coaches’ office next
to a narrow room cramped with lockers.
“It’s a clubhouse. They’re a different
culture, speak a different language, but
the laugh in the clubhouse is the same.”
Once sidelined, romantic comedies rise again
By Lindsey Bahr
The Associated Press
L
OS ANGELES — Summer is
always full of action and superhero
pics, but this year a once dormant
yet utterly adored genre is back in a big
way: the romantic comedy. After a 2017
without any from a major studio, this
summer is proving to be a re-birth for this
lost Hollywood staple with five notable
releases, including Crazy Rich Asians and
a Mamma Mia! sequel.
The reasons for the genre’s decline are
many. A post-recession focus on
international audiences, franchises, and
superheroes have helped to push
rom-coms off the priority list for studios.
Also, after a long and fruitful run in the
late ’80s through the 2000s, enthusiasm
started to wane. They had become stale.
There were a few outliers, of course, like
Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, but the big
studio rom-coms became derivative, lazy,
and dull.
“They didn’t reflect the way that society
was changing. They were all about white,
straight couples. They fell back on the
conventions that define the genre,” said
Erin Carlson, author of the book I’ll Have
What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron’s
Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic
Comedy, and an upcoming book about the
films of Meryl Streep. “People just got tired
of them.”
A death, of sorts, was necessary for the
genre to rise again with a new set of voices.
It didn’t hurt that The Big Sick made a
splash at the box office and went on to get a
screenwriting Oscar nomination — the
kind of prestigious recognition rarely
afforded to classic rom-coms that don’t
have a Silver Linings Playbook edge.
“(The Big Sick) showed that people still
want a good rom-com at the multiplex, but
they want one that pushes the genre
forward in new, interesting ways that
reflect real life today, not tired tropes of
yesterday,” Carlson said.
And indeed, the rom-coms of 2018 are
continuing that forward movement.
Earlier in the year there was Paramount’s
Book Club and its focus on older women,
20th Century Fox’s Love, Simon’s gay, teen
protagonist, and the bilingual Overboard,
which has become the highest-grossing
film for Pantelion Films.
Set It Up, a Netflix release, is perhaps
the most throwback of all the films. It is
about people with actual jobs that
consume their lives instead of playing a
glamorous backdrop to whatever romantic
exploits the movie dictates. Zoey Deutch
and Glen Powell star as assistants who
decide to set up their miserable and
difficult bosses, played by Lucy Liu and
Taye Diggs.
It was dreamt up by Juliet Berman, the
head of development for Treehouse
Pictures,
and
screenwriter
Katie
Silberman, both ardent rom-com fans who
met as assistants in Los Angeles.
“I grew up at a time when rom-coms
didn’t have a negative connotation, they
were just my favorite movies,” Silberman
said. “I wanted for a long time to try to
write something that would make
audiences feel the way the movies I loved
growing up made me feel. They’re fun and
kind and warm and nice and smart.”
The script got the attention of Hollywood
with a spot on the coveted Black List in
2015, a survey of the industry’s best
unproduced screenplays. It was picked up
by MGM and even had Game of Thrones’
Emilia Clarke to star, but it started to fall
apart when the studio wavered and Clarke
had to go back to shoot her television show.
The team, including Powell, was
undeterred.
“We met with a lot of people who really
liked the script, but so many people would
say, ‘oh it’s not right for our platform,’ or
‘it’s not right for our slate,’” said Set It Up
director Claire Scanlon. “There were so
many rules for people who were picking up
films and if it didn’t fit perfectly with
exactly what they had coming out, then
they didn’t want to do it.”
That all changed in a meeting with
Netflix, when executive Matt Brodlie
agreed to make it in the room — he said yes
in January and they were shooting by
May. Netflix has also released a few other
romantic comedies this year, including
Ibiza, When We First Met, and The Kissing
Booth. And, likewise, Amazon was the
shop that took a gamble acquiring The Big
Sick.
It’s not just streaming platforms
re-embracing the genre — the big studios
are too. Universal has Mamma Mia! Here
We Go Again, with many of the original
cast as well as Cher and Andy Garcia. And
Warner Bros. is releasing the adaptation
of Kevin Kwan’s popular novel Crazy Rich
Asians on August 15.
Nina Jacobson, who produced Crazy
Rich Asians, saw an opportunity in the
story about a Chinese-American woman
who travels to Singapore to meet her
boyfriend’s parents to take audiences to a
world they haven’t seen in a mainstream
American movie, and also touch on
universal themes.
“So many (romantic comedies) became
so formulaic,” Jacobson said. “But it is a
genre that has been historically beloved
and successful and this felt like a great
way to re-approach it.”
The independent realm, which has been
keeping rom-coms alive for some time, also
has a few boundary-pushing releases on
the schedule, both about people in their
early middle age finding love. The
Sundance charmer Juliet, Naked, based on
the Nick Hornby novel and starring Rose
Byrne, Chris O’Dowd, and Ethan Hawke,
comes out August 17, followed by
Destination Wedding, which boasts a ’90s
dream cast in Winona Ryder and Keanu
Reeves who star as single wedding guests,
on August 24.
“It’s a dark comedy,” said Destination
Wedding producer Gail Lyon. “They’re
playing the idea of two broken people who
have had the (expletive) kicked out of them
in the love department. Can they really
find enough hope to find something or is
cynicism going to rule the day? It’s really
funny and really honest about finding love
later in life.”
Lyon, who also produced Win a Date
with Tad Hamilton!, knows that the movie
business is cyclical, but thinks that
rom-coms needed to get back to the basics
— character and dialogue — while also
“twisting the paradigm a little bit to keep it
fresh,” which she says Destination
Wedding does.
If 2018 is the start of a new era of the
romantic comedy, Carlson thinks that one
day we may trace it back to The Big Sick.
Continued on page 9