Jim Small, MLB Vice President, Asia Pacific: If baseball is going to be successful in China, it needs to be a Chinese sport

As the media partner and sponsor of the 2018 SPORTELAsia (13-15 March), Yutang Sports had the chance to talk with Mr. Jim Small, the Asia Pacific vice-president for MLB, who shared his insights about the league’s expansion strategy, sponsorship business and social media plans in China.

Yutang Sports: The first question is, MLB has been one of the top professional leagues in the US. Could you please tell me how it’s global expansion is going and what about in Asia Pacific, especially in China?

Jim Small: Absolutely. Outside of North America, the two most important markets for baseball are Caribbean and Latin America, so places like Venezuela, Cuba and Mexico. And the driver of our business in Asia has always been Japan, Korea and Chinese Taipei. About 15 or 18 years ago, our owners started to ask the question, what about China? And can baseball become popular in China?

So what we did from 2001 until about 2005 or 2006 was to try to learn about China. We knew that we couldn’t just come into China and say “Hey! We’re Major League Baseball! Love us!”, right? It wasn’t practical. We had to learn about the China market first, the China’s sports culture and what Chinese people like and what the business would offer. 

So we took our time and really learned three things in those first few years: 

One is that the government is everything in China and anything that we were gonna do to be successful had to include a strategy to work closely with the government. 

The second thing we learned is, education is everything in China and the parents, just like parents everywhere, but I think specifically in China, because at the time, with the one-child policy, parents wanted paramount number one was that one of the children have an education and sports was not viewed necessarily as compatible with education, which means you’ve got education or you played sports. That’s very different than America, where the concept of a student athlete and college sports is so popular that you can do both, so we learned education.

And number three we learned is long-term partnerships are everything and finding the right partner, being loyal with that partner is the only way to grow, so we learned those three things. 

So those three things and we decided that yes, we think that we can be successful. We think that the Chinese sports culture and culture in general lends itself based on. We think that I always like to say, everybody in China is a baseball fan, they just don’t know it yet, but they once they find out about the beauty of baseball, it’s perfectly suited for China. 

Yutang Sports: What’s your long-term and short-term goals in China? And could you please tell us what you will do to achieve them? Any progress you can share with us?

So what we decided in China was to do two things. If you can imagine a railroad track and kind of moving in one direction parallel, going to the same direction, that’s the way we view our strategy. 

So one of those tracks is making the game visible, making the game have context. What I like to say is, we want to give social permission for Chinese kids to play baseball. So what that means is, on that rail, we do things like making sure the game is put on television, making sure you can buy a product with three hundred stores selling it in China now. 

And we have a strong television footprint across the country. We were in grassroots programs. We put baseball in schools who run something called the roadshow, which is 2.5 million people a year getting to engage in our sport through that, you know, picking up with that ball or throwing a pitching target. So all of these things are there to create context. 

The second rail is high end development and that’s working primarily in two areas, one is the China national team. We have funded the development of the China national team since 2005 and the coaches all come from the United States. The second thing is our development centers. We have three of them. What we do is, we go and recruit around the country and we tell the parents three things. We can promise, give us your child at twelve years old, we’ll give them back to you at eighteen. 

We guarantee three things, they’ll speak English because all the instructions are in English and we have extra lessons that our kids have to go through to to be able to speak English well, because we’re preparing them to go to the United States. Number Two, they’ll have a great education. The third thing we promise is that, there will be a good athlete. 

So we have educated smart, great baseball players. Now we can have popular baseball in China, because if baseball is going to be successful in China, it needs to be a Chinese sport. It can’t be an American sport or an Asian sport, so it needs to be played by Chinese, coached by Chinese, umpired by Chinese, announced on television by Chinese. It’s got to be a Chinese sport. And so we're trying to create a generation, a baseball generation of China and we’ve had some successes for now.

Yutang Sports: Let's talk about the sponsorship business, so what do you think is the most important thing for an MLB sponsor?

Jim Small: We’ve been there for now about ten years, when we’ve been really investing and so our sponsors are seeing us as a healthy, reachable, attainable opportunity for kids. And so I’ve had sponsors tell me that, you know, baseball is a Chinese sport, for it’s perfectly suited for China and so I think they see that those values reflected in baseball. 

Now the most important thing is, every sponsor is the same as a business, so we have to have return on investment, and so I think that has been the most important part. Yes, they like us, they like baseball, but we’ve been able to show that, we have 60 million people watching our games on television. We have 2.5 million people attending our events. Our social media following is continuing to grow. So they see that they can sell more milk, if it’s a dairy firm or put more people in airplanes if it’s Delta or build a bigger, and more popular brand if it’s Intel. Those are the reasons why they are with us.

Yutang Sports: Thank You. You just mentioned the social media, so how did you engage with followers on social media?

Jim Small: To be perfectly honest, we are still figuring that out. Social media is a really important tool. It’s a very powerful tool, but people in China engage in social media differently, with people in Japan, or people in Korea, definitely people in the United States. 

So what we’re trying to do is, the idea that we have is the same in all of those markets and we want a young person in Tokyo and a young person in Beijing and a young person in Seoul and a young person in Boston, to use social media to engage with our brand, right? The voice we use is different. So we will hit specifically in China through Weibo and through WeChat. 

We know we have a really, really strong part for baseball there. So what we’re trying to do is have a conversation with those people and to work harder to be informational to let them know, we have this event coming up, or this thing is happening or “Hey, what do you think about this?” Part of it is entertainment and so we try to reach out and introduce our star players through our Weibo now. 

Yutang Sports: I’ve known that at you have partnered with our Chinese Baseball Association (CBA), right? So could you please give us an introduction about the cooperation?

Jim Small: Back through from starting in 2004, I think, we started running programs with the CBA. We have many, many relationships. Obviously, the national team training is the biggest, probably the most important. So the CBA is responsible for that. We work closely with them on that training, but then we’ll do things like coaching programs, umpire development, just branding one of the things. 

Yutang Sports: Let’s talk about the broadcast. As you have a MLB.TV, right? Could you please give us any details about it?

Jim Small: Sure. MLB.TV is an English language product that goes around the world and it is something that is clearly aimed at English speaking fans, but if we’re gonna be successful, we have to have locally relevant programming and meaning in the local language. So in every country we go into, we make sure that there is content in that local language. It is generally not done through MLB.TV, it’s done through local partners. 

So for in China, we have a kind of three pods of partners, one is a network of regional broadcaster like Jiangxi TV and Guangdong TV.

The second area is, we signed last year a relationship with Chinese Education Television (CETV) and we have programming going into every school in China through CETV, which is really, really important for us to be able to expose the game to that many young people.

Then the third area is digital broadcasting. We’ll have a new broadcaster which we can’t tell you who it is here, but we will be announcing something in the next two weeks. But it will be clearly a similar, a better, a more expansive partner, where our games will be seen, four games a week throughout the country in Chinese language. So that’s coming. 

Yutang Sports: We’ve read the news about MLB’s partnership with Facebook and you endorse the rights to the platform to stream 25 regular season games, right? What’s the idea behind this deal?,

Jim Small: A very good point. So one of the things that I think this is not exclusive to Major League Baseball, but I think the customer is deciding where and when and what devices that they want to consume products, right? It’s up to us to provide them them. 

It’s a weekday game in the United States and so the Facebook is a perfect way to distribute that, because generally people couldn’t be home in front of their television, right? They’re gonna be at work, they’re gonna be traveling or gonna be doing something, so the ability to watch a game for Facebook, where people are living anyways, on the phones or desktops that work, is a great way for us to connect with our fans. 

Yutang Sports: How do you choose your broadcasting partners?

Jim Small: One of the things that I’ve been excited about is that there is much more interest from broadcast partners in Major League Baseball, because they’ve seen that there’s growth. They’ve seen that there’s a buzz about baseball. That’s what somebody once told me recently. 

And so we look for partners that can help us with distribution, but we also look for partners who want to be partners and not someone who just wants to take our product and throw it on the air. We want someone who will grow with us and we are a partner that offer back to them. We will be a partner, so we will help promote that partner or that television into the offline, you know, in our roadshows on our social media, because we want them to promote us in that television and media world. So we look for people who think the same as we do.