Recently, Major League Baseball (MLB), Japan's Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angels was elected the 2021 American League MVP of the Year. His influence is analogous to Yao Ming's regular season MVP in the NBA.
Although Kan kanjun does not know much about baseball, MLB's influence in countries with developed baseball sports such as the United States and Japan is definitely much greater than that of the NBA.
Among the four major sports leagues in North America, the NFL (Major League Soccer) is the absolute boss, and MLB is the deserved second, according to the survey MLB in the United States audience of 12%, while the NBA is only 8%, MLB merchandise sales are twice as large as the NBA.
The talented baseball player born in Mizusawa, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, in 1994 landed on the MLB arena at the end of 2017.
It is rumored that the baseball genius who still speaks English today had a request for all 30 teams in mlb that wanted to get him, that is, to present him with a bilingual label of the reasons for wanting to get him and the future plans, and then he picked out 7 more teams to interview, and finally he selected the Los Angeles-based Angels.
Even if Yao Ming was an NBA champion at that time, he only had a passive selection, but Shohei Otani could take the initiative to choose his favorite team, which is really very exaggerated, and also reflects his strength from the side.
Shohei Otani and Wizards player Yamura
Shohei Otani is already the favorite athlete of Japanese teenagers. In second place was figure skater Yusuke Habu, third was tennis player Naomi Osaka, and Japan's NBA player Yamura was only eighth in popularity. This shows the influence of Shohei Otani in the minds of Japanese teenagers.
Looking at our other neighbour, South Korea, the brightest sports star in South Korea is undoubtedly Son Heung-min, who plays for Tottenham Hotspur, one of the five major leagues in Europe.
He is not only the most successful football player in Korea today, but also the best football player in all of Asia. Earlier this year he was named the AFC 2020 Best Overseas Athlete.
In the 2022 World Cup Asian Zone Round of 12, the South Korean team, led by Son Heung-min in Group A, finished in the top two places in the group with 4 wins and 2 draws and 14 points after 6 matches, basically locking two places with Iran directly to Qatar. On the other hand, our Chinese team in Group B, currently played 6 games, 1 win, 2 draws and 3 losses only accumulated 5 points to rank fifth, theoretically there is still a possibility.
They are all sports cards for Japan and South Korea and even represent the whole of Asia to the world. Since the retirement of our little giant Yao Ming, it seems that we can no longer find such a sports superstar who can connect to the world.
The pain of the Tokyo Olympic men's basketball team's unexpected absence is still vivid, and the national football team is reading with the prince year after year.
Perhaps we still have a long way to go from a sports power to a sports power.
But what may be more urgent in the hearts of the Chinese people at present may be the need for a good athlete like Yao Ming who will put up the Chinese flag at a major international event.
How we hope that in the next two or three years, such a person can appear in the four major professional leagues in the United States, or the five major leagues in Europe, representing our China as the new Asian light, without envying others.