No one knows the Texas AirHogs quite like Larry Green. Over the team’s eleven seasons playing baseball, the 61-year-old Green has missed only five home games in Grand Prairie. On summer nights, Green pilots his Jazzy electric wheelchair to his perch on the concrete concourse behind home plate, where he cheers wildly; grumbles about how modern players spend too much time trying to hit home runs; and hollers PG invective at the home-plate umpire.

“That’s my big excitement,” Green said, taking a break between loudly questioning strike calls on an early August night. “That and trying to get these players to run out ground balls.”

The Texas AirHogs are members of the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball, a federation of twelve, mostly Midwestern, teams unaffiliated with Major League Baseball. Inning breaks are punctuated with water-balloon-toss competitions and mascot races. The level of play is good, but with more overthrows and rundowns than you’d find on an average night at a big-league ballpark. Admission starts at $8 for adults, the parking is free and convenient, and season-ticket holders like Green and his roommate, Sharen Norton, get treated like big-shots. The AirHogs’ general manager, J.T. Onyett, visits the pair every game and sometimes offers up the VIP amenities. When the temperature crept to 110 degrees earlier this summer, the AirHogs’ staff ushered Green, Norton, and a few of their friends up to a vacant air-conditioned luxury suite. “I love the Rangers,” Norton, a 62-year-old grandmother says. “But would they do that?”

Photograph by Jonathan Zizzo

Almost everything about the AirHogs’ existence feels folksy and draped in Americana. So it came as a surprise to the team’s small group of season-ticket holders when, at a meet-and-greet with team executives before the start of the season, Onyett told them that their little hometown ball club would be undergoing a first-of-its-kind experiment. Instead of fielding a typical American Association team of fringe prospects, has-been minor leaguers, and guys trying for one last shot at The Show, the 2018 AirHogs would, in effect, lease out the majority of their roster to players from the Chinese national baseball team. Ten veteran non-Chinese pros—five pitchers and five position players—would supplement the national team squad, acting as on-field ringers and off-field mentors.

The Chinese have long been afterthoughts in Asia’s baseball pecking order, lagging well behind their athletic and political rivals Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Few people in China watch or play the sport; the development system is tiny, and the country has yet to produce even a high-minor-league-caliber player. (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have all produced major-league stars.) But with baseball returning to the summer Olympics in 2020 after a twelve-year hiatus, the Chinese government saw a reason to invest in the sport. Shipping their players to North Texas to play one hundred games against American pros would be the first big step.

When Green and Norton first heard about the impending arrival of the Chinese players, they didn’t know anything about the history of Chinese baseball. But they did know about their team in Grand Prairie. The AirHogs had won the American Association championship in 2011, but lately, they’d been more like the Bad News Bears. The team hadn’t had a winning record since 2013, they’d finished in last place two of the past four seasons, and—with barely a smattering of fans attending most home games—it sometimes seemed like they might not be able to stay in business. So when Green learned that China, a nation of 1.4 billion, was sending the “cream of the cream” of their baseball talent, he couldn’t help but get excited. Norton was even more hopeful.

“I wondered what the other teams were going to think when we started bashing the pants off them,” she said.

When the AirHogs’ season began on May 18, Green and Norton quickly recalibrated their expectations. The Chinese national team players that arrived in Texas were young, inexperienced, and far from world-beaters. “They didn’t know what was going on. They would do some things that a Little League team would do,” Green said.

But in August, watching the AirHogs take on the Sioux City Explorers seventy games into the season, Green was pleased with what he saw on the field. “They’re really jiving,” Green said. “And the Chinese guys always run it out, which I like.”

Earlier that day, the AirHogs’ Chinese players had gathered for a light morning practice of fielding drills and soft-toss, then filed into the stadium’s former sports bar and grill, which has been repurposed as the team cafeteria. A heavy aroma of dried red chili peppers, sizzling meat, and heaping quantities of dried cumin wafted from ten steamer trays.

In preparation for the season, the AirHogs’ ownership group had enlisted Gary Gao, the owner of Plano restaurant Sichuan Folk, to coordinate the team’s meals, and they’d given him the resources to go on a nationwide talent search for “A-level” Chinese chefs who would cook authentic meals before and after games. The two men sweating over the kitchen’s row of industrial-sized woks in early August both came from northern China via Los Angeles and, as lunchtime began, dozens of Chinese players waited in line for their chance to scoop generous portions of the chefs’ dry-pot chicken and braised bok choy onto their trays. (A common refrain among the AirHogs’ non-Chinese staff and players is that the cuisine is “different than what you’d get at Panda Express.”)

Catered meals, to say nothing of authentic Chinese feasts, were not the norm for the AirHogs before the 2018 season. In previous years, a Texas AirHogs player could expect at-bats, a long-shot chance at returning to minor-league ball, and basically nothing else. Salaries in the American Association are meager to modest. (Three-thousand per month is a star’s wages, and most players make closer to the $1,300-per-month league minimum.) The season was full of grueling bus trips as far as Winnipeg. Job security continues to be non-existent.

But the 2018 Texas Air Hogs are different, in many ways operating more similarly to a major-league club than to their American Association counterparts. The AirHogs fly on jets to most of their away games. The Chinese players live together at a local Country Inn & Suites, and are chauffeured to games, practices, and the area’s outlet malls, where they load-up on designer clothes and apparel that’s far more expensive back home. The players enjoy the services of a newly hired strength-and-conditioning coach (in the past, AirHogs players had to work out on their own), and they can take advantage of an in-stadium weight room that was built before the start of the 2018 season. These amenities were part of the pitch to the Chinese, and it showed that the AirHogs’ current management was more capable than the team’s past record suggested. “We’re not some fly-by-night independent group,” Onyett told me. The Chinese were, in fact, already well acquainted with this fact.

AirHogs pitcher Zhang Tao on the mound on August 17, 2018. Photograph by Jonathan Zizzo Han Ji Chao and Ni Zi Yang observing the Chinese national anthem with their teammates. Both the American national anthem and the Chinese national anthem are played at AirHogs Stadium. Photograph by Jonathan Zizzo Left: AirHogs pitcher Zhang Tao on the mound on August 17, 2018. Photograph by Jonathan Zizzo Right: Han Ji Chao and Ni Zi Yang observing the Chinese national anthem with their teammates. Both the American national anthem and the Chinese national anthem are played at AirHogs Stadium. Photograph by Jonathan Zizzo