# Why do Asian teams win the Little League World Series so disproportionately often? **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [February 19, 2018, 9:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-asian-teams-win-the-little-league-world-series-so-disproportionately-often/809109 "2018-02-19T09:46:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2018, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-asian-teams-win-the-little-league-world-series-so-disproportionately-often/809109/21 "2018-02-24T21:24:06Z")
The era of Taiwanese dominance of the LLWS ended a long time ago. In the last 20 years only one Taiwanese team has even made the final, losing in 2009 to a team from California. This question is at least a full generation out of date. Japan has done really well lately, but Japan has rather a lot of baseball players, so that is explainable by simple random chance. ---
**Author:** ![Mangosteen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Mangosteen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangosteen)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2018, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-asian-teams-win-the-little-league-world-series-so-disproportionately-often/809109/22 "2018-02-25T01:42:47Z")
> [@TokyoBayer](#): > > 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. One weird thing that I noticed when I lived in Taiwan was that I _never_ saw a “pick up” game of baseball where kids would go to a local park for a game. Never saw kids with bats, balls and gloves on the bus. One would have thought that with their Little League teams doing so well, many similar aged kids would be out playing ball. Saw plenty of kids playing basketball in the parks, but no baseball. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2018, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-asian-teams-win-the-little-league-world-series-so-disproportionately-often/809109/23 "2018-02-25T06:23:50Z")
I have a few more minutes to respond. First of all, again, we need to note that Taiwan has not been a dominant force in the LLWS for a long time. Nonetheless, they used to be, so why? To get something out of the way, there is absolutely zero evidence Taiwan systematically cheated by sending overage players, and there is affirmative evidence they didn’t, as Little League investigated that accusation more than once. Certainly, there HAS been cheating of various kinds - a Filipino team was stripped of the championship in 1992 - and I’m not saying it is impossible a Taiwanese team didn’t cheat, but it is no more apparent than any other team. Anyway, it is actually to be expected that Little League dominance will be prone to weird clumping, because 1. Districting - the drawing of geographical boundaries in which teams are drawn from - cannot reliably be done in such a way as to ensure an equal spread of baseball talent. Prior to 1997 it is certainly the case that Taiwan’s manner of districting clumped a lot of talent together, for reasons unique to Taiwan that are too boring to explain. (This has been characterized as cheating, but it kind of wasn’t, or maybe it was. They cheated originally, for sure.) Districting still unevenly divvies up talent, even in the USA. 2. The extent to which Little League baseball is seen as a crucially competitive affair versus a way for children to have fun and get exercise will have an obvious effect on the possibility of winning championships, and Taiwan took this REALLY seriously in the past. This remains the case; some districts produce exceptional teams simply because that’s where the coaches, organizers, and parents take it really, probably TOO, seriously. If you have one place where the parents are just fricking nuts about it and spend a zillion bucks on sending Tommy to baseball camp and push for winning winning winning, and another where the parents are pretty casual about it and just see Little League as a way to get Henry out of the house, who do you think’s gonna win? 3. Coaching. The difference in Little League between a coach who is a trained, skilled expert in teaching boys to play baseball, and a coach who got the job because he was the guy who was available, is almost impossible to overstate. A hand picked expect coach can turn a shitty Little League team into a contender for district champ in a month. Baseball is an inherently skill-difficult game and a coach who knows how to impart skills upon young boys will improve them as ballplayers with astounding speed, while a coach who does not know how to do this will see his team flail. Children between the ages of 11 and 13 should visibly improve as ballplayers within the span of a single season. They are that easily trained, and a great coach will simply outpace the inferior coaches. While the kids change out over a couple of years on a team, the COACH does not. The coach is far and away more important than any player. Obviously all of these things work in tandem, and they happened to all work together in Taiwan. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-asian-teams-win-the-little-league-world-series-so-disproportionately-often/809109.md?page=1)