Teams from Taiwan and the other Asian nations have
won the Little League World Series disproportionately often.
Does this indicate that the Asian players, as opposed to teams, are that much better than American players?
If so, why are the Asian players that much better?
If the Asian players are not better, but the teams are, how come?
Perhaps it is something like the best players are filtered into a small number of teams, so that the players on these best e teams are better than those on the best American teams, but Asian players are not in general better than American, though the players on the best teams are better than the players on the best American teams.
Or perhaps the players on the best Asian teams are not better, but the teams train harder.
Ive often wondered the same, and I assumed that it is due to the way the roster is selected for the team that actually goes to LL competition.
Im not sure if a LLWS team is the same roster that played together all season long, of if there is some amalgamation of several teams to form a sort of an all-star team.
It could be that there is a more limited number of teams in Taiwan, so a player has to be better to make the team in the first place. In the US, the goal is participation weighted, to make sure that every kid has a place on a team. It might be that a similar sized talent pool in Taiwan gets funneled into a smaller number of teams, so the last nine men standing are better.
Here’s a parallel. There are five high schools in Wichita, each one the size of a small college. Only twelve boys in each one make the traveling basketball team. Out in Trego County, there are five little high schools, so small that they barely have five boys who can dribble. If Trego plays a game against Wichita North, guess who will win. There is nothing inherently better about the skill of the Wichita boys, they just have a much deeper talent pool from which form the best lineup.
every US team is an all star team from a given area/league. They are picked from a given league and the area that league covers varies . The league could cover one town or one county.
There have been accusations that Asian countries such as Taiwan, will cheat more, bringing in kids from other areas. The Little League officials say they investigated and it is not true.
The usual explanation, and probably the best, is Asian countries tend to be more regimented and into group activities. Lots of practicing and you really need to practice playing baseball, both fielding and hitting, to play it well.
Looking at the total numberof victories for all the divisions, Taiwan would seem to be an outlier, but part of the problem is that these totals show the combined total for foreign countries where US states or regions are separated out.
1 Taiwan 58
2 Southern California 18
3 Florida 13
4 Japan 12
5 Puerto Rico 11
6 New York 9
Hawaii 9
8 East Texas 8
Florida South Carolina Host Team(s) 8
10 New Jersey 6
Mexico 6
Venezuela 6
However, if you look at the individual regions in Taiwan you get:
Taiwan Taipei 20
Taiwan Pingtung 13
Taiwan Taichung 7
Taiwan Tainan 6
Taiwan Kaohsiung 4
Taiwan Taoyuan 4
Taiwan Hualien 3
While it’s still impressive, it puts the numbers into more perspective.
As far as sports go, I’m not as familiar with Taiwan as I am Japan, but I think they are fairly similar. It’s sort of like why the Scandinavian countries with their small populations do so well in the Winter Olympics. There are fewer other choices in sports, they have well developed systems, and kids spend more time practicing the fundamentals.
Adding up all the US teams ilisted above it looks like they have a total of 54 wins, assuming that list is all-inclusive. In which case that’s pretty close to Taiwan’s total.
If you compare a country’s win total to the total of only a part of another country, then that’s like comparing the number of World Series wins the Yankees have had to the total of the entire National League, then ask why the NL is so much better. That’s apples and oranges.
On the other hand, it does look like Taiwan and the US are both much better than the rest of the world at LL baseball. That’s interesting info.
FWIW Little League is just one “code” of rules that has a 12U world championship. Cal Ripken which plays what’s called 50/70 ball also has a world series where the US wins about half the time with Japan and Mexico splitting the rest (I think Korea won one or two as well). The difference is there’s more hitting/fielding in Ripken since the pitcher is a little farther away, the base paths are longer, and the runners are allowed to lead off.
An even closer look shows how impressive Pingtung’s teams have been. Pingtung has a population of just over 200,000 and yet has 13 championships. Taipei, on the other hand, has a population of around 2.7 million and has 20 championships.
Taichung 2.7 million ( 7 championships)
Tainan 1.8 million ( 6)
Kaohsiung 2.8 million (4)
Taoyuan 2.1 million (4)
Haulien 100,000 (3)
However, I don’t think the Taipei LL team consists of an all star team chosen from the entire Taipei region. For such a large population area, it would seem that a region as big as Taipei would be broken down into several districts and each of those districts would produce an all star team, No?
And the “winningest” district all star team would go on to represent “Taiwan” in international play.
Supposedly, it is because Asian teams tend to spend more time on baseball and training than their American counterparts.
It got to the point where, in 1975, they changed the Little League World Series to the “Little League Championship Series” (they may have retconned the World Series name to it since then) and limited it to teams from the USA. Non-USA teams were allowed back in 1976. I am not entirely sure of the reason, but my best guess is, the kids wanted the opportunity to play against the foreign teams, no matter how good they were. (Technically, only USA teams were eligible to win in 1992, just as only non-USA teams were eligible to win in 2014, and there’s also the story of how a team from Mexico won the USA title in 1985, but that’s another story…)
My WAG as someone who knows little about the sport:
It may just be a case of “He who takes (a thing) most seriously; wins.” So maybe Taiwan just happened to fanatically farm out, develop, emphasize and hone the game to the point where it won the bulk of Little League championships while most other countries didn’t care as much. Kind of like how China utterly dominates table tennis at the Olympic level (although in China’s case it may have to do with being able to siphon the best of the best out of 1.3 billion) - if a country is utterly determined to top other countries at the sport, and nobody matches it for level of fanaticism, then it will more often than not win.
It can be noted that Taiwan has performed relatively poorly at baseball at the (grown-up) international level (its performance in the World Baseball Classic has been pretty sorry, for instance.) So that may really indeed be a case of just taking it more seriously. Plus, once you’ve tasted victory, you want more of it, and that first championship (or first few) Little League championships by Taiwan may have just poured more gasoline on that fire of driven determination.
But…there were also politics, too. When Taiwan first began winning in Little League, it was at a time, IIRC, when Taiwan had just been kicked out of the UN and its relationship with the USA was very strained and the country was in international doldrums. Lots of poverty, too. Winning at *something *was good for the national psyche, even if it was just kid’s baseball.
2 out of 3 are correct, but those two are really one. On a per player basis they aren’t demonstratably better. But they do tend to be better coached which leads to actually learning fundamentals and thus playing a bit better.
They might actually use coaches that know something about how to train young baseball players. It wasn’t until I was in high school and had a coach who actually knew how to teach things that I realized all my former coaches knew effectively nothing and were just there to organize practices. I went back to watch my high school play years later and they had a different coach, and I saw the players making the same kind of mistakes that I would have made if I hadn’t been set straight by my high school coach. The team was absolutely pathetic compared to the team I was on, and it’s not like they didn’t have athletes since they won the state title in soccer around that time. Low-level sports are almost all about the coaching. (If my high school had been bigger, like most high schools, the coaching would be less important as talent levels would rise. But we were a small school that had trouble even fielding a full team at times - we definitely played with 8 on at least one occasion.)
I don’t remember if it was in You Gotta Have Wa, or another one of these books, but Whiting has talked about little leagues. This book discusses the cultural differences between Japan and the US.
I didn’t play sports as a child, so I don’t have personal experience, but I saw the difference between how Japanese little league teams function and my nephew’s rec league.
I used to live near some practice areas in Tokyo and those kids were serious. They were there for practice for much longer and over a much longer season. They would go over the fundamentals much more. They had more coaches who seemed to be more experienced.
My nephew was on just a typical rec league with fewer practices and less experienced coaches. Certainly there are more serious leagues out there. I wouldn’t be surprised if the average Asian team had an advantage over an average US team.
If a society decides to take a sport or pastime seriously, devotes time, effort, money, facilities and organisation to it and has a decent working population to pick from (the benefit of a talent pool doesn’t scale linearly) then it will probably do well.
Think Netherlands and Skating, USA and swimming, New Zealand and Rugby.
The UK did woefully at many Olympic sports, 1996 marking a low point but purposefully ramped up all of the above factors and ended up second on the medal table in 2016. (just above China who had done something similar in previous decades)
People are surprised by Iceland doing well in football but over a decade ago they began to take the game really seriously. Again all those criteria above were applied, real grass roots stuff (even though grass pitches are not the norm there) and even with a small population of 330k it was possible to find a squad of players good enough, with the right organisation and training, to take on the big boys.
Sport is littered with similar examples so the Asian little league success isn’t so much of a surprise.
Were you there during that time period? I lived in Taiwan when the country first started winning LL championships. My stay began around 1975 and ended about seven years later. Taiwan’s economy at that time was booming, Was everyone rich? No, but virtually everybody had a decent home, a job or business and plenty of food to eat and clothes to wear. The country was part of the Four Tigers along with Hong Kong, South Korean and Singapore. The Taiwanese have two things going for them. A very strong drive to succeed and a family to support them should things temporarily not go well.
You want poverty? While living in Taiwan, I visited India. You should check out the poverty in Calcutta. Also saw the slums in Manila when I traveled to the Philippines. Parts of Jakarta are a nightmare.
Where did you get the idea that Taiwan had poverty in the 1970’s?
I had asked my Taiwanese wife about this, but she’s not into sports of any kind so she had no idea.
However, I asked a couple of my students today. They said there are a number of factors.
First, Taiwan has a system where some elementary schools have excellent sports programs. The daughter of one of the students goes to a school here in Yilan County (which is sort of like a providence rather than a US county-level) which has a top ranked ping pong team. There’s always several alumni of that school on the national ping pong team. The county government provides some financial assistance for the team. (They do that, our family is studying kendo and the county government provided free uniforms and swords if we attend a certain number of weeks of training.)
These nationally ranked teams expect the elementary students to devote themselves to the sport, which runs counter to the general expectation that students are supposed to put studying above everything else. My student said that he pulled his kids off of the ping pong team because the coach kept pressuring them to practice more and study less.
They said that many of these strong teams have many aborigines. Although aborigines make up only 2.3% of the population of Taiwan, my students say that 50% to 60% of professional baseball players in Taiwan are aborigines.
Aborigines tend to be poorer than Han Chinese, and many parents enroll their kids on the baseball teams as a means of keeping them out of trouble. The players aren’t expected to work as hard in school so the teams are popular with the kids.
There is a certain amount of discrimination against aborigines so I don’t know if this is really accurate or could be a stereotyping, although I suspect there is some truth there.
Several of the areas which have done well in the Little League World Series including Pingtung, Taoyuan and Haulien have large aborigine populations.
All of this is according to the students, I have no way of really verifying this information. However, it is interesting and could help account for Taiwan’s success.
The women’s US pro golf tour is now dominated by Asian players, a lot of them are Korean. They train a lot starting at young ages, they don’t have college sports like we do. At one point they tried to put in a rule that the players all had to know English but that was dropped after a backlash.