Team China has been on an east coast tour, mostly playing teams from the New England Collegiate Baseball League. Yesterday the team beat the Danbury Westerners 19-6 and while the level of competition isn’t what it will face in the Olympics, everyone seems to think Jim LeFebvre’s squad is improving. The team pounded out 23 hits and five HRs in the game.

Following the game, Westerner catcher Brad Pippa came away impressed with the offensive performance of Team China.

“They’re obviously a very good hitting team. They can jump on pitches if you make mistakes. They hit the ball hard all over the place.”

Steve Ontiveros, who replaced Bruce Hurst as the pitching coach earlier this year, says he’s implemented an arm strengthening program which has helped add speed on several of his pitchers. He says two of his pitchers can now throw 90 MPH.

“We’ve made vast improvements, but we still have a long ways to go,” Lefebvre said. “In order to compete on an Olympic level, the speed and the power of the game is totally different. We had to get these guys to understand the kind of baseball we wanted them to play.

“For the first four or five years, they heard ‘Olympics’ and it was like a little dream out there. Now they can see it. They see the finish line. Their focus and intensity has really picked up.”

During May the team played teams from extended spring training, racking up a 17-7 record. As Lefebvre notes, this team isn’t as good as most of the teams that will compete in the Olympics. However, TC will be playing with a great deal of pride and focus — it wouldn’t be surprising to seem them pull off an upset or two.