By JULIET MACUR
BEIJING — On a dusty, shoddy baseball field here this spring, Jim Lefebvre, manager of the Chinese national baseball team, gathered his players and demonstrated the Red Sox slugger Manny Ramírez’s philosophy on hitting.
“If you hit it here,” Lefebvre said, acting as if he were hitting a ball after it passed his body, “you drive a Chevy.”
“If you hit it here,” he said, pretending to hit the ball as it crossed the middle of the plate, “you drive a Cadillac.”
“But if you hit it here,” he said, pretending to connect a smidgen earlier, “you’re in a Rolls-Royce with a chauffeur! Get it? That’s how much money they have. They don’t count it, they weigh it!”
The players, who speak little English, stood by, looking puzzled. Yi Sheng, the third-base coach and unofficial team interpreter, struggled to relay the story.
Yu Lei, a pitcher, giggled and said in Mandarin: “The coach has got a good sense of humor. We all like his gestures. But, no, I can’t say we understand him most of the time.”
Through language and cultural barriers, Lefebvre, a good-natured former manager with the Seattle Mariners, the Chicago Cubs and the Milwaukee Brewers, keeps trying to teach his Chinese players the finer points of baseball.
His job is to prepare the Chinese national baseball team for the Beijing Olympics, with the pride of the host country and its team at stake. But this is the Chinese squad with the least expectations. The host country receives an automatic baseball berth, which is the only way Lefebvre’s team could have qualified.
“Our goal is not to become Olympic champions, but to play the game right,” Lefebvre said. “We just don’t want to be embarrassed out there, you know?”
In the 1960s, Mao Zedong banned baseball in China because of its Western roots. Even after his death in 1976, the sport never caught on.
And yet, because of the marketing potential of the country’s 1.3 billion people, Major League Baseball has invested tens of millions of dollars into seeding the sport in China, league officials said.
Chinese officials asked for help with their baseball team five years ago, and since then, Major League Baseball has paid the salaries of Lefebvre and the other American coaches who round out his staff. The league has also subsidized the team’s training trips to the United States since 2003, when Lefebvre became manager of this group.
“It’s really hard for us to get money for our sport from the government,” said Shen Wei, the team’s liaison to the Chinese sports bureau. “Our government would rather pay attention to sports in the Olympics that give many gold medals, or sports where we have a chance to win. We are a low priority. It’s a kind of mental anguish to see that not many people pay attention to baseball in China.”
The Beijing Games will be the first Olympics for the Chinese team — and perhaps its last. Baseball is being dropped as an Olympic sport after 2008, unless it is reinstated by the International Olympic Committee. The Olympic baseball stadium — newly built but temporary — will be torn down when the Games are over.
China will initially play seven games against the countries that qualified based on performance, powerhouse programs like the United States, Cuba and Japan. The teams with the best records advance to the medals round.
“They could win a game against anybody, though it’s a stretch to say they could win a couple,” said Ed Burns, a vice president at Major League Baseball who has been directing the league’s support of the Chinese national team. “They are just so far behind the other teams.”
Tom Lawless, one of China’s coaches, said his team had only six players who could play in the minor leagues. Major league scouts rated the players mostly 2’s on a scale of 1-8. The former Cincinnati Reds shortstop Barry Larkin, another coach, said the players’ talent rated at about a high school or a college level. “They are knowledgeable about the game, but have no attention to detail,” he said.
Lefebvre, who once played a cannibal on an episode of “Gilligan’s Island,” has used his ample charisma to try to convince his players that they could win a game in the Olympics. But it has been a challenge. When he first addressed his players five years ago, they would not even make eye contact. Most of them came to baseball in their teens after failing to advance in two or three other sports, he said.
Lefebvre, 66, gave an impassioned speech this spring: “We’re here to get ready for the Olympics and strength is part of that. You don’t order room service and say, ‘Hey, send me up some strength.’ You have to go and get it yourself. So how many of you want to go lift weights?”
Only one player raised his hand.
“They’re just not aggressive people,” Lefebvre said. “It took a long time for me to convince them that it’s not O.K. to smile when you strike out.”
Other unexpected obstacles popped up while working in a sports system mired in tradition.
He and Shen, a serious woman who often wears mirrored sunglasses and a black sweat suit, butted heads. Shen, a former military officer, preferred long practices. Lefebvre wanted more efficient ones.
They disagreed over lineups. Shen once chose seven relievers and only one starting pitcher for the roster, Lefebvre said.
But they agreed that their training facility was subpar.
Other Chinese Olympians have cutting-edge facilities. The baseball players share their site with a sports school. They must walk a mile from their dormitory to the field, adjacent to a cluster of shacks where workers live with no indoor plumbing.
The team’s baseballs are worn with deep cuts and holes. The weight room is filled with outdated weight-lifting machines and broken treadmills. “Like high school equipment from the 1970s,” said Ed Yong, the team’s strength and conditioning coach.
Twice a year, Lefebvre travels from the United States to train the team at its facility. Twice a year, the players leave for what Yi — the coach who learned English by listening to the Bee Gees — calls “baseball heaven.”
They train in Arizona and play against extended spring training teams or fall league teams. This year, they spent much of the spring there and then traveled to New England to play college-level teams. They squeezed in trips to Yankee Stadium, and tourist sites like Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles.
“We’ve learned to love baseball because of its beauty and also the teamwork,” second baseman Liu Guangbiao said. “No matter if you are tall or short, you can play this game. Baseball is our life now, it’s just inside of us.”
In the past, the Chinese were often clobbered by American teams. But this time around, after five years of training with major league coaches and playing more games against tougher competition, the team was 22-9-2, with a batting average over .290 and an earned run average of about 4.
Before a game last month against the Keene Swamp Bats in Rindge, N.H., Lefebvre said there was a moment when everything seemed to be coming together.
When the players realized they had left their CD of the Chinese national anthem at the last stadium, they did not panic. Instead, standing pin straight, shoulder to shoulder, they sang the anthem a cappella.
It brought their manager to tears.
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