Today I’m going to introduce you to the greatest baseball player who never was, Tsang Wong Foo. The year was 1887, and the Chicago White Stockings were looking for more pitchers. They had ace hurler John Clarkson but little else, and so one Milwaukee newspaper decided to dramatize their plight by inventing a new pitcher the team had found in China. On May 15, 1887, the paper proclaimed that Chicago had signed a 6’ 7” pitcher named Tsang Wong Foo, stating: “This collection of bones, muscle, and gristle was none other than Tsang Wong Foo, an athletic coolie from the village of Kwachu, in the the province of Kiangtsu, and he is now a skilled baseball pitcher.”
Next, the paper described how Tsang attained his talent, writing,
A Chinese professor, after some research, discovered that the art of curving a ball in the air was known during the time of Confucius, and that it was merely a primitive form of the art which had been causing tops to travel up hill in China for the last 1,600 years. Aided by these discoveries the professor at once put twenty men into practice at curving the ball according to the regulations of the National Baseball League. The men soon attained wonderful proficiency. After three months of steady practice Tsang Wong Foo was picked out as the best of the lot and at once placed on the market and shipped to Chicago.
Not only could Tsang curve his pitches around posts and drive nails into boards with them, he could do so both right- and left-handed. He could also pitch fourteen consecutive hours without tiring. Perhaps nodding toward the acknowledged American prejudice against the Chinese at the time, the paper stated the Tsang would play in the National League under the name Mike Murphy.
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What Happened to Tsang Wong Foo?
No one with either named appeared in the major leagues in 1887, of course. But besides the obvious absurdity of claiming Tsang Wong Foo could pitch fourteen hours straight without needing a rest, there are lessons here. First, Tsang’s size. The average baseball player of 1887 stood 5’ 8” or so. Observers in 1887 would consider players of average size today as very large men. By making the imaginary Tsang Wong Foo so tall and giving him such unbelievable endurance, the paper reflected the desire of baseball teams of the time to find large men in peak physical form.
The other is probably more obvious—the stereotype of people from China as possessing mystical knowledge unknown to Western nations. One might claim that while a stereotype, it at least gave Chinese people a nod for their homeland’s cultural and scientific achievements of the past. It also, however, served to label them as fundamentally different from other Americans, adding to the different language, clothes, food, and religion of the Chinese.
Before I close today, if you are a baseball fan, you may be thinking this whole story sounds familiar. You should be. Next time, I’ll give another story of a great baseball player who never was.
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