Mainland China’s World Baseball Classic team is practicing at the Detroit Tigers’ spring training complex in Lakeland, Florida this month. The Chinese considered both St. Petersburg and the former Dodgers camp site in Vero Beach before settling on sharing quarters with Detroit players at the Tigertown complex in the small central Florida city.
Former major league skipper Terry Collins, a Michigan native who grew up in Michigan, is managing China in 2009, replacing China’s 2006 WBC manager, Jim Lefebvre. Collins said last week, “We called the Tigers knowing that people have come here before, and they said, ‘Yeah, we have an opening.’ So here we are.”
“We” include players from a country in which baseball is a minor sport, despite large crowds in last summer’s Beijing Olympics. While baseball can trace its roots in China back to 1861, the two Wukesong ballparks used last summer are already on a demolition list to make way for a shopping mall despite being less than two years old.
China was winless in three WBC games in 2006, and went 1-7 in the 2008 Olympics.
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