SI: The Secret Of Wang
Albert Chen of SI has done a big feature on Chien-Ming Wang. Click here to read it. (Hat tip to the print issue of SI in the waiting room of my periodontist.) Some of the cool parts:
[Wang] sits in the passenger seat of a midnight-blue minivan with tinted windows as it squeezes through a swarm of cars and motorbikes, on the city’s main avenue. Peering through the side window he spots a line of customers at a street vendor’s cart and decides that he wants what they want: a small piece of cake stuffed with red bean — a local specialty he won’t be able to get once he returns to the U.S. in another week. But because he is Chien-Ming Wang, pitcher for the New York Yankees, he can’t step out of his vehicle, or even roll down his window, without making news in the next day’s papers. “The street food, it’s what I miss most in America,” he says in a rare moment of wistfulness. Wang could dispatch his bodyguard, Daniel, who is driving, but left waiting in a parked van, Wang would surely be recognized through the front windshield. It happened two years ago, when, on his way home from the airport, a mob of more than a thousand blocked the narrow street to his home. For more than a hour, he sat with his wife in a stationary car, surrounded by the throng until 40 policemen arrived.
So to the notion of buying a piece of cake, Wang says, “Forget it,” and the van rolls on, headed to a gym, where it pulls up to the rear entrance.
Wang had been exposed as a one-pitch anomaly, or so said the baseball cognoscenti, the scribes and the sabermetricians who’ve long proclaimed the 6-foot-3, 225-pound righthander the beneficiary of a large amount of good fortune. How else to explain why a pitcher with a minuscule strikeout rate, who misses fewer bats than almost every other major league starter, could be so successful? No, Wang’s October wasn’t just a pair of fluke performances in an otherwise accomplished season, nor was it the result of a tired arm, but rather the sign of something larger. This, the skeptics said, was perhaps where the end began.
The adopted son of workers in a metal utensil manufacturing company, Wang played Little League but was never regarded as a standout while growing up in Tainan. “In high school, he was kind of terrible,” says Louis Yu, a sportswriter who covered Wang then. “He was tall and very, very skinny. His delivery wasn’t smooth, and his fastball was not impressive.”
Just as Wang was about to sign with Seattle, with him and his family sitting at home in Tainan wearing Mariners caps, New York swooped in with a $1.9 million offer. “While we knew Tsao could be a star,” Yu says, “Wang never had a great game in high school or college like him. People in Taiwan were surprised [the Yankees] gave him so much money. No one thought he could be a star.”
Wang’s sinker gradually earned a reputation as one of the game’s filthiest pitches. “An ultimate weapon, like Johan Santana and his changeup,” says Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte. “It’s the best sinker I’ve ever seen.”
Halfway around the globe, in a baseball-crazed country starved for somebody to root for, Wangmania took off.
Now Taiwan’s major newspapers charge a higher advertising rate for issues published on a day that Wang pitches, as well as the day after each start. The country’s largest circulation daily, Apple Daily, estimates that it sells as many as 300,000 extra papers on days that carry reports of another Wang victory. Endorsements that have come Wang’s way include McDonald’s, Ford, E Sun Bank (one of the largest in Taiwan) and computer-maker Acer, which claims that Wang’s name alone has increased its product sales by 10% and lowered the average age of its consumer by almost four years.
On the Yankees, Wang has no close friends. He has known second baseman Robinson Cano the longest — the two rose through the minors together and were promoted to the majors within a week of each other in the spring of 2005 — but neither can recall the last time they socialized outside the ballpark.
More than the fans, major league clubs believe what they’ve seen from Wang. Over the last two years they have signed 15 players from Taiwan, and nearly half the teams have full-time scouts on the island. Kao sees the talent coming up through the high schools and colleges, and it gives him hope. “The quality level here is getting better,” he says. “Coaches are learning, coaching smarter.”
Will there be another Chien-Ming Wang? Kao laughs, sounding as if he thinks the question is absurd. “No, I don’t think so, not while I’m still living,” he says. “He is a precious gem. Our precious gem.”
Great story.
