In recent years, baseball "has been working hard to follow the NBA's blueprint in gaining a foothold in the country — in short, attempting to replicate the conditions that produced Yao Ming," said Jonathan Jensen, a consultant and assistant professor in the Girard School of Business at Merrimack College in Massachusetts. "But while baseball has been popular for a long time in Japan and South Korea in particular, China is light years behind and, when you think about it, it really has only been 20 years since Asian players finally broke through to make an impact in MLB, with [Hideo] Nomo in 1995 and Ichiro in 2001."