While I could count on zero hands the number of Chinese people I met in China who cared about baseball, I would need more than two to count the number of brick-and-mortar MLB stores I saw, simply by wandering around various cities like a normal human being. The first store I entered in Beijing explained some parts of this phenomenon: In China, as elsewhere outside the U.S., MLB is a streetwear brand, not a sports league. Subsequent research filled in the rest: MLB is licensed in East Asia by a South Korean retailer, which has successfully turned it into a billion-dollar enterprise in China.
This means that you can more easily find MLB-branded gear in more styles in China—handbags, puffer coats, eared beanies, puffier(?) baseball caps—than wandering around a city in the United States. The trade-off is extreme limitations in team selection. The streetwear brand's detachment from the actual sport of baseball and its attendant loyalties has odd side effects: In two separate stores, in two separate cities, I encountered window displays of mannequins wearing both Yankees and Red Sox gear. In response to this phenomenon, Barry Petchesky, Yankees fan, offered the following comments: "Oh [no]" and "They love that stupid heart shirt!!" I think it's a sweatshirt, Barry, but I agree with the sentiment. From Samer Kalaf, Red Sox fan: "The duality / Of fan."
Yankees/Red Sox/Dodgers domination in overseas markets is nothing to get worked up over—you'd sooner get angry at the laws of physics. What I am mad about is that when I was perusing the hat wall during my first but certainly not last MLB store in search of one (1) singular Philadelphia Phillies hat, I discovered that the fourth-most represented team was ... the Cleveland Guardians.
The logic isn't totally illegible. You get an NY and an LD and a B, and you may as well just throw a C in there as well. On the other hand: the Guardians? From Cleveland, of Ohio fame?
My wrath was tamped down upon finally finding a Phillies hat. Just the one, a standard red baseball cap with a somewhat undersized logo on the front, but a Phillies hat nonetheless. That was easy! I thought, and proceeded not to buy it. The satisfaction of the hunt was, in that moment, enough. A new goal for the trip came to me: For every MLB store I saw, I would go in, find a Phillies hat, and leave.
The first part of the quest, "find multiple MLB stores," was laughably easy. I didn't even have to actively search in order to keep my ratio of MLB stores to days spent in a city high. This was thanks to spending a lot of time in malls—not out of a love for shopping, an activity I tolerate at best, but because a lot of the ready food and entertainment options were concentrated in malls. If you are a dumb baby set loose in a Chinese city on your own, the easiest way to account for meals is to find a mall and go there; on multiple occasions that local friends took us out to eat, we wound up eating at a restaurant in a mall.
Sidebar: I'm sure the presence of real eating options doesn't fully explain why almost every mall I visited was doing very well for itself, while seemingly every food court–powered mall in America is dead, but it surely comprised a part of it. With the expertise of someone who grew up on the Rapidly Dying New Jersey Suburban Mall Experience, other shared factors that possibly contributed to mall success included: being in cities with large population densities, not being surrounded by a sea of parking lots or parking buildings (much of the parking was situated underground), being readily accessible by foot and public transit, and having five or more floors rather than continuing to spread the footprint across multiple blocks.
The point is, nearly every mall I went to had an MLB store. Some even had MLB Kids stores, in the malls that had floors or sections of floors dedicated to children. This is no doubt why there was a noticeably higher population of fashionable babies compared to the American average.
In Qingdao, we took a post-McDonald's digestion walk through a mall, and noticed an MLB store. My very patient and generous sister walked in with me. The first store in Beijing calibrated my expectations—there was no shot I was finding a cute jacket with the Phillies logo on it—and I went directly to the hat wall. I had to hop to see the ones on the top row. No Phillies hats. Plenty of—sigh—Guardians hats. A Giants hat, which was fine. An A's hat, for some reason? OK, now they were going too far.
I left more disgruntled than I entered. The next MLB store I saw, I went in with a plan: I'd ask someone, in case they happened to be storing all of the Phillies hats in the back. I worded my question carefully: "Do you have a hat with a 'P' on it?"
It was very clear that the worker had never been asked such a question in her life. "What? A 'P'? No," she said.
My goals shifted. I no longer wanted to find a Phillies hat in every store I saw; I just wanted to find one Phillies hat, and when I found it, I would buy it. Wherever we went, I was on the lookout for an MLB store. I saw Pirates hats. Tigers hats. Red Sox hats with oddly small logos. A Yankees hat in Oakland A's colors. In the market by my uncle's house, a hat seller had knockoff MYB gear: all Yankees. Clearly, someone wasn't considering the market inefficiency of MYB-brand Phillies hats. We went to Shanghai. The MLB store on a pedestrian street gave another combined Yankees–Red Sox display and no Phillies hats. The next day, I spotted an MLB store on my navigation app as we got off the subway. My very patient and generous sister said, "OK, we can't go into every single MLB store you see." We did not go into the store. What if that one had the Phillies hat I so desperately wanted?
On our final day in Shanghai, I caved and went to a mall just to find an MLB store. There was one right by our hotel. It was only half-filled. When we finally arrived at the MLB store, it was closed. Maybe that was a fitting end to this quest. I meandered glumly down the hallway in search of an exit, and then, two doors down, saw it: an open Mitchell & Ness store, filled with basketball gear, including an Allen Iverson shrine. A big side panel read, "FROM PHILLY WITH LOVE." You know what? Close enough.
