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.

Murray Chass wrote an interesting blog post today about the Mets’ offseason process:

But more than one agent cited the Mets’ inability to deal with more than one free agent at a time as the primary reason they lost out on free agents. “We’re interested in your guy,” more than one agent recalled the Mets saying, “but we have to deal with this other guy first.”

In one instance, the Mets were a player’s first choice, an agent said, but he was one or two down on the Mets’ pecking order – a phrase used by another agent – and the player and the agent weren’t going to wait for the Mets to deal with them. They went elsewhere….

Another agent called the process frustrating. I have other names for it: foolish, wasteful, destructive, irresponsible, to suggest a few. Surely, a general manager is capable of talking to more than one agent simultaneously, working on parallel tracks, even if one signing depends on another.

I’ve used this space to rip Chass a bit in the past, but getting on the horn with agents to dig up dirt on the Mets is definitely the type of thing he spent a long time training to do, and everything he writes here seems to fit with everything we’ve already heard about the Mets this offseason.

But what I don’t get is why so anybody’s acting like this is an altogether new problem. Remember that last year Omar Minaya said, on the record, “we’re not in the position-player market, we’re in the starting-pitcher market.”

It’s certainly possible — and entirely likely — that the issues have been amplified by the rumored hedges on Minaya’s power that might now be in place, but it doesn’t seem like operating with a narrow and myopic focus is exclusive to the 2010 version of the Mets’ front office.

This is another clip from Takashi, in which Val Pascucci hits a game-winning pinch-hit home run for Bobby Valentine’s Marines. Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure Pascucci himself described to me the way the Pascucci cheer went on all at-bat long, but I guess I never really considered how strange that would sound until I actually saw it on video. To be honest, it seems like it would be distracting, but it’s awesome regardless:

I’m certainly not here to hate on breaded and fried pork, but I don’t know how anyone could even begin to compare the cuisine of Indianapolis with the cuisine of New Orleans. Non-starter.

WAR, huh? What is it good for? Predicting the Mets to suck.

Hey look, it’s Anthony Tao. Last time I saw this guy, I was trying to hire him to write for SNY.tv, and he was all, “I’d love to, but I’m moving to China.” Guess he did. Awesome story on Stephon Marbury, some language NSFW.

Does the coin toss matter?

Big thanks to Takashi to pointing me to this massive developing story out of Japan. Tsuyoshi Shinjo has apparently shaved his head. Check it out:

I can’t say I’m 100 percent in favor of the decision. I realize I should know better than to doubt Shinjo’s fashion choices, but man, he had some good hair, and I can’t help but think its absence is society’s loss. Still, maybe Shinjo’s just so far ahead of the fashion curve that I can’t even comprehend how stylish his newly shaved head is, and soon I’ll come to realize how good he looks.

That said, even he looks like he’s still getting used to it.