There’s going to be no shortage of ink in the next few days concerning the MLB exhibition games in China. I’ll resist linking to the Trevor Hoffman Visits the Great Wall kind of stuff and throw out a couple links offering what I see as slightly different takes.

Steve Henson, writing for Yahoo! Sports paints the Chinese as positively ambivalent about baseball, interviewing several people who could generally care less. Probably not a good idea to gauge the entire population from this sample-size, but it’s an alternative view nonetheless.

Chinese television will carry the exhibition games between the Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers on Saturday and Sunday, and MLB officials have said that means the sport will be exposed to 700 million people.

A sampling of locals produced the following conclusion to that claim: It’s preposterous.

“Some people might turn to the channel for a minute because they are curious,” said Feng Guang Heng, a senior at Beijing Sport University. “But they can’t understand the game because they don’t know the rules. They won’t know what’s going on, so they won’t watch.”

The second piece is from the LA Times, a paper I’m linking to way too much these past few days, written by Mark Magnier. The story is called A major league push in China.

Promoters of the game say baseball suits the Chinese physique and character with its emphasis on agility and teamwork over size. Analysts also give Major League Baseball points for the ambitious grass-roots school program, important in building a fan base from scratch. The league is training coaches, working with sports and education authorities and has donated thousands of bats, balls and gloves to participating schools.

But baseball faces huge challenges in China, including some shared by other sports. Perhaps most fundamentally, there are relatively few soccer fields, and almost no baseball diamonds. Even the Wukesong baseball facility is reportedly set to be razed after the Olympics.

Razed? They just finished building the thing last summer!