Olympic Baseball - Only in China

Although the Red Sox beat the Angels Saturday night at Fenway, 10-5, thanks largely in part to a David Ortiz grand salami in the bottom of the 5th inning with the Red Sox down 5-2 at that point, today I would rather write about Olympic Baseball in China. You see, today was the day I was to have a first hand look at the Beijing Olympic Baseball Stadium, where all of the Olympic baseball games will be played during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. At 9:30 am sharp on a hot and humid Sunday morning, 5 hardy baseball fans piled into the car and drove about 45 minutes to the western edge of the city where the WuKeSong Culture and Sports Center was being constructed. The WuKeSong Baseball field was playing host this week to the 2007 International Baseball Tournament, which was part of the Good Luck Beijing Sporting Events leading up to the Olympics Games in 2008. Essentially, the Good Luck Beijing events are trial runs to get all the kinks out enabling everything to run smoothly when it really counts. The morning game today was Japan against France and in the evening, China was to play the Czech Republic.

According to its website, construction at the WuKeSong complex had been completed and the city of Beijing could proudly boast of 3 brand new baseball stadiums that could hold 18,000 spectators. The website also proclaimed that the stadium had been recently handed over to the Beijing Organizing Committee and it was one of the first of the Olympic venues to be ready for use.

In reality, the complex is far from complete, the only seating area for spectators being a grandstand behind home plate. There are no other seating areas at this field or elsewhere--as the two other fields are basically construction sites. Although the entrance to the stadium is right next to a subway stop, as we had stubbornly foregone public transportation, we could not avail ourselves of this convenience and instead, had to trek about one kilometer from our car (since the parking lot was also not completed).

At a cost of 20 Renminbi each, it would cost us approximately US$12 for the 5 of us to attend the game--parking included. Approaching the ticket window, we could see the scoreboard from outside and determined that the game was already in the bottom of the 3rd inning with Japan leading 1-0. We could also see that there were only 50-100 people in the stands on this Sunday morning. In an "only in China" fashion, the guy manning ticket booth told us that that the game was sold out. "How could this be?" we asked as we pointed to an almost empty grandstand. The 100-150 people milling around the entrance confirmed to us that they had been told the same thing. "Sorry no tickets, the game is sold out," even though there were thousands of empty seats. Evidently (according to the employees at the entrance to the stadium who all spoke good English and admittedly were trying to be helpful even as they were melting under the siege of hundreds of ticketless and disappointed baseball fans), the organizers of the tournament distributed thousands of complimentary tickets to Chinese companies, friends and family, colleagues, sponsors etc. and none of these persons with comped tickets bothered to show up (as they probably had no interest in baseball to begin with). This left hundreds of increasingly irritated hardcore baseball fans outside the near empty stadium, willing to pay good money for tickets but with no tickets for sale.

As the situation escalated to a near riot situation--and I am not making that up--several ticket scalpers worked the perimeter of the crowd looking to profit from the chaos. Without missing a beat, I of course I approached a scalper--he was shading looking even by usual scalper standards--and we quickly agreed on a price for the tickets. As we were about to close the deal, several police, who had been monitoring the angry crowd, approached the scalper who bolted at the first inkling of danger. The last I saw of him, he was running across a heavily trafficked road, jumping over a waist high fence across the median with Beijing's finest in hot pursuit, dissapearing into the Sunday crowds. By the way, I understand Japan won the game 4-3 in front of a sell-out crowd.