China Baseball League founder and vice-chairman Tom McCarthy empathizes with the Edmonton Cracker-Cats, who struggled through their debut campaign in the Northern League in 2005.
"It's not easy to start from scratch in an independent league, especially in a great sports town like Edmonton," McCarthy, a Boston native, told the Sun in an e-mail interview from Beijing.
"But at least you guys have a history and tradition with baseball. Over here, when we launched the CBL four years ago, 95% of the people had no clue about the game. But we've made a concerted effort to reach as wide an audience as possible with marketing and promotions, and now that's starting to pay off."
The CBL expanded from four to six teams in 2005, and managed to snare a Game of the Week national network TV deal in soccer-saturated China.
While the three-time league champion Beijing Tigers are widely considered the New York Yankees of the CBL, there's a growing parity that McCarthy sees as key to eventually challenging South Korea and Japan for Asian baseball supremacy.
"The key for our league is to keep developing homegrown talent and not rely too much on the three imports each club is allowed. We'd also eventually like to get to the point where we can do player exchanges with independent leagues overseas.
"Who knows? Maybe someday we can have a guy from the Cracker-Cats suit up for Shanghai or Beijing, and send one or two of the CBL's best to play in Edmonton.
"That would be the ultimate road trip."
