Real Clear Wire By Susan Crabtree 7/12/2023
Baseball may seem as American as apple pie, but many of its most popular bats and gloves are made in China and owned by a company implicated in the Chinese Communist Party’s forced labor abuses.
Just hours before baseball fans were gathering in Seattle for the MLB’s All-Star Game Tuesday, across the country, members of Congress hit the league for continuing to allow Louisville Slugger and Wilson bats and gloves to be used in its games.
In 2018, China-based Anta Sports purchased Finland’s Amer Sports, which owns Louisville Slugger – once considered an all-American brand favored by Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson – as well as Wilson brand sports. Louisville Slugger, founded by manufacturer Hillerich & Bradsby 138 years ago, operates a factory and museum in its namesake Kentucky hometown. But many of its bats have been made in China since 2008.
Anta Sports, which was the official Olympics uniform supplier for the Beijing winter games in 2022, has faced heavy international scrutiny for refusing to say whether the cotton from its products is from the northwest region of Xinjiang.
The area is home to the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority that has been brutally persecuted by the Chinese government. More than 1 million Uyghurs and other religious and ethnic minorities have been forced into mass internment camps and conscripted to work in factories and sweatshops.
“I do wonder if Major League Baseball understands how they’re being complicit with forced labor,” Isaac Stone Fish, a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council, testified Tuesday before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
Louisville Slugger bats are used by about 13% of MLB starters. Rawlings, which remains an American company based in Missouri, is the most dominant brand with a 39% market share, with Wilson second at 29%.
The MLB itself has its own direct business deals with Chinese companies, which have grown increasingly common over the past decade in a global and competitive market where sports firms are looking for greater capital and scale. Chinese tech giant Tencent and the MLB in 2017 announced a wide-ranging partnership that includes live-streaming 125 games, including the All-Star Game and the World Series.
The NBA’s business ties to China also came under fire during Tuesday’s congressional hearing, which featured testimony from Enes Kanter Freedom, a former NBA player for the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks. Kanter Freedom was dropped from the NBA in early 2022 after speaking out about China’s human rights abuses and for wearing shoes emblazoned with the words “Free Tibet” and “Free the Uyghurs.”
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https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2023/07/12/china_commission_to_mlb_us_firms_stop_subsidizing_chinas_abuses_149482.html
