IS THIS [BOO!] JOKE?

[Korin]

plz tell me it is lolz

[James]

No? Seriously. This is a serious matter!

[devtherev]

I'm with Korin...Especially taking into consideration the date

[Jordan]

are you kidding? baseball was one of the most important legacies of the three kingdoms. it was invented by emperor huan, who played it incessantly while declining to attend to affairs of the state: One of the principal reasons for the fall of the Han! Later it was an important sport practiced by the nobility to prepare for war. After all, scoring a home run on a ball is really good practice for making an enemy's head go flying as well.

[Tigger of Kai]

Absolutely! As was proved by the great Cao Capone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-sV-O2-jCY

[TooMuchBaijiu]

plz tell me it is lolz

The only "joke" is that we haven't discussed it earlier. I've longed for a forum where we could talk at length about a fundamental Chinese pastime. See, the Americans learned modern baseball from a Chinese pastime known as 棒球, pronounced as Bàngqiú, which was once a noble sport invented by a great Han Emperor to prepare his retainers for war, but by the nineteenth century had devolved into an annual tradition in rural China in which nine or so farmers would frantically chase an ostrich with big wooden sticks. Many villages took pride in how many ostrich pelts they could accumulate, and compared their triumphs with other villages. The village in any given province that claimed the most ostrich pelts won a great 幡, which today we would call a "pennant".

So I'm very glad that James finally decided to shed some light on this obscure part of Chinese history. Took him long enough.

[SunXia]

Haven't you heard of Sun Shang Xiang's baseball bats that aligned her walls with her sharp weapons??