By: William Liao
For over a decade, Major League Baseball has been opening player development centers in China, aiming to attract new talent in the sport.
The program, part of Major League Baseball’s player development initiative, offers academic and baseball schooling for students starting from seventh grade and established its first development center in the city of Wuxi in 2009. Soon, additional centers opened in the nearby cities of Changzhou and Nanjing too.
Ray Chang, who was born and raised in the United States, is the manager of baseball operations for the initiative and head coach of the Nanjing branch. He has been working full-time in China since 2017, when he retired from playing in the minor league of the San Diego Padres for twelve seasons.
Chinese players usually sign as international free agents, such as the first development center graduate Gui Xuan Yu, who signed with the Baltimore Orioles in 2015. But a new generation of recruits is looking at a different path in order to join the M.L.B draft – by attending college in the United States.
One such player is DJ Suonandajie, one of Ray Chang’s former students. At five feet eight and 184 pounds, he plays center field and bats leadoff. He didn’t play baseball until he was 10 years old, when recruiters scouring the country found him in 2011 and sent him to the Changzhou center after noticing his foot speed and throwing accuracy.
DJ, a 24-year-old native of Qinghai, a mountainous province in the west of China, attributes that accuracy to a common task among Tibetan children – hurling rocks at yaks to make them stop grazing, not trying to hit the animals but instead landing it close enough to startle them.
Neither of his names are real – DJ is the nickname he goes by and Suonandajie, which means “increased and abundant merits” in Tibetan, was given to him by a monk. Buddhism is the primary religion among China’s Tibetan minority.
After he graduated from the high school program at the Nanjing center, he came to the United States, earning a spot at the Los Angeles Harbor College. After graduating from community college, he received a scholarship to play baseball for Rockhurst University, a Division II school in Kansas City.
“I like the idea of pitcher versus batter, just me against him,” DJ said of his passion for baseball before a recent Ban Johnson league game. “My first game in the summer league this year, I strike out first three at-bats, but when I get another chance, I was like, ‘You got me the first three, but I got this one,’ and I squared that ball and hit it in the gap. I flipped my bat and I said to myself, ‘I got you.’ That kind of idea that you just don’t give up until the last out, I really like that.”
“Any player development project, especially one started from scratch, takes time, but I think we’re getting closer by the day to seeing a Chinese player in Major League Baseball,” Bryan Minniti, a former assistant general manager for the Philadelphia Phillies who oversaw the organization’s scouting and player development, said. “From a scouting perspective, every team is hungry for players with tools, and it doesn’t matter where they come from. If there’s a 6-foot-2 left-hander with a really good arm, he’s going to get noticed.”
In the past, only two Chinese-born players have made it to the Major League, but neither of them was of Chinese heritage. But with the 20-round draft coming up and with another development center graduate, Roger Rang, who is also Tibetan, on the tables, the notion that history could be made soon is not too far-fetched.
Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/sports/baseball/dj-suonandajie-china-mlb-draft.html