The Times had a great article today about Brian Cashman’s trip to China to show off the Yanks’ World Championship trophy:

M.L.B.’s goal is to build a base in China like the N.B.A.’s. It broadcasts games to more than 50 Chinese television stations and reaps tens of millions of dollars in revenue from Chinese fans. But baseball has a long way to go: four million people play baseball in China, according to Xinhua, the state news agency, and the country has a relatively meager professional league. By comparison, China has a nationwide basketball league, and 300 million Chinese are said to play the sport regularly.

That sounds about right — basketball is absolutely everywhere in China. I spent a month there in the summer of 2007, and spotted hoops in the Forbidden City and at the foot of the Great Wall. A student I spoke to asked me to “detail the extent of Yao Ming’s genius.”

It makes sense for Major League Baseball to be doing outreach to China. Even one marketable Chinese star could mean a huge boost in revenue and a massive expansion of the international-recruiting base, assuming the country takes to the sport anything like it has to basketball, which it probably would, since baseball’s awesome.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote from a Chinese Internet cafe in 2007. (Incidentally, the Chinese word for Internet cafe is pronounced “wangba.” But “wangba dan” means “turtle egg,” which, in Chinese slang, means “son of a bastard.”) I was oversimplifying things a ton, but I was all gussied up on grad school at the time. I really just wanted to reprint it here because I liked the Colonel Sanders line.

And there’s little or no sign of [baseball] in China.

Still, there’s hope on the horizon. Though the intricacies of baseball can appeal to high-minded audiences and the spectacle can appeal to more lowbrow fans, baseball is undeniably a middle-class fascination. In a nation that exerted so much effort squashing out class distinctions and so-called bourgeois behavior for so long, it makes perfect sense that baseball — like many sports — hasn’t entered the hearts and minds of the Chinese population. It’s one of those ‘opiate of the masses’ things that Karl Marx railed against.

(Little known fact: Marx’s quote on religion is about as frequently taken out of context as any maxim there is. Marx himself was a recreational opium smoker, so his stance on religion wasn’t nearly as harsh as it sounds today. I find baseball, in reasonable quantities, to be a pleasant, healthy alternative to opium for taking the minds of the people off their fettered working conditions.)

But though president Hu Jintao and most of the Chinese government are still technically part of the Chinese Communist Party, capitalism now dominates Shanghai and most of the urban parts of China I’ve seen. Retail shopping permeates every inch of storefront and sidewalk space, and the ominous Big Brother stare of Chairman Mao has been replaced by the perhaps equally ominous stare of Colonel Sanders — there’s a KFC on every corner, it seems.

And stadiums are under construction everywhere I turn. None of them look to be dedicated to baseball, but it seems like only a matter of time before the growing fascination with sports in China — spearheaded by the excitement surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics — leads the giant nation to baseball.