UNEXPURGATED VERSION!!!

Freelance correspondent John Krich takes us from the baseball diamond to the Great Wall to canap-¦s with Hall of Famer Dave Winfield

5:12 AM. They say this is a glamorous life. Here I am, being paid to hob-nob with some of my all-time sporting idols as they stage the first baseball games ever in my all-time favorite country for observing winners and losers in the game of life. But in order to make this ten-day trip really pay off, I’ve got to deliver five articles and I lie awake wondering: How can I write about the changing condition of Chinese athletes when no one will let me get near a real athlete? How do I turn the indifference of Beijing toward the Olympics into a different sort of story? And where, amongst a million zillion restaurants, will I find one to confirm my hunch that the Olympics are bound to be celebrated with some new and very strange culinary concoctions? (I will end up finding it on my very last morning.) Or maybe it’s just jet-lag that’s keeping me up to watch “The Player” on HBO. In a few hours from now, I’ll meet some real players from Tinseltown, the Los Angeles Dodgers.

8:58 AM. Thanks to my confused body clock, I’ve no time for breakfast before meeting my translator in the hotel lobby. So I order a cappuccino to take away. I discover too late that a new hotel trainee has chosen the wrong size of plastic lid. When I lift Styrofoam to my lips, the lid falls off and I spill the entire cup of hot foamy stuff down the front of my shirt. Welcome to China!

9:39 AM. On the way down smoggy Chang’An, I give my less than enthralled translator a cram course in American baseball terminology. How do you say “balk” or “bunt” in Mandarin?

9:51 AM. The taxi is looking for Wukesong Stadium, and I spot the likely place, a concrete grandstand hung with easily visible banners showing the Major League Baseball brand and large logos of the two participating teams, Dodgers and San Diego Padres. But the cabbie never makes a U-turn and just keeps on driving. He insists that there is another Wukesong Stadium. As always in China, I am challenged to test local claims again what I see with my own eyes. I decide to trust my eyes, and my translator finally wins a protracted argument for the cabbie to turn back.

10:01 AM. I’ve come to the right place, but the eager student volunteers at the credentials table won’t allow me to take my translator inside. We do an end-run on bureaucracy and sneak in anyway. The stars of the Dodgers, the team I’ve followed through boyhood, are about to hold a press conference. But I learn that the Padres are scheduled to hold a clinic at an elementary school at the very same time. Quick decisions like this can make or break a story. I cast aside boyhood loyalties and head to the scene of some Chinese kids’ indoctrination into America’s National Pastime.

10:26 AM. The public relations rep tells me the school is “walking distance.” But knowing what that could mean in Beijing, I grab another cab. The school turns out to be four new satellite towns and three time zones away. I’ve missed much of the clinic and there are no signs posted on the school grounds. A jogger on the running track points the way. I expect to witness some touching private scenes between gum-chewing U.S. ballplayers and awestruck Chinese tykes grappling with their first bats and balls. Instead, the uniformed children are doing serious drills and look like they’ve already got all the postures and gestures down pat. And what encouragement the Americans offer is done mostly for the benefit of a mob of TV cameramen who hog every inch of the small school gym’s perimeter.

11:04 AM. I watch batting practice preparations and wander between locker rooms, not so much in search of access as an angle. I strike up a conversation with Dodger’s assistant general manger, the first and only Chinese-American plus first and only woman to hold such a position. But she seems silenced by her pride at the event, or relief it’s finally happening, or the Beijing smog. Some San Diego pitchers tell me about last night’s foray to try snake, cat and who know what kind of intestines at street stalls. And the Dodgers’ team president, and wife of the owner, quizzes me about where she should eat.

12:59 AM. Suddenly, all the Dodgers have disappeared out the locker room door. I get word that they are headed for their one and only sightseeing excursion, to the Great Wall of course. Volunteers tell me there are no press allowed, but when I hover beside the busses in the parking lot, no one seems to object to my grabbing an empty seat. I hope to harvest some great quotes from small-town kids exposed to the exotic East for the first time. But most of the athletes are silently listening to rock on their Ipods, or gabbing in Spanish to Latin American teammates, while the sportswriters are engrossed in tapping away on their laptops. How do they crank out their five hundred words when the first game isn’t even until tomorrow?

3:11 PM. The last time I went to the Great Wall on a whim was for the Millennium, and I was so frozen that I had to buy a PLA surplus coat and fur hat just to survive the dawning of the new age. I should have known I would get the big chill again this time, just to see a bunch of rookies pose for one another on the ramparts, then scamper out of hearing range.

5:17 PM. My translator and I we decide to head back by taxi. But Badaling must be the one place in China where none can be had. We pile dutifully back into the team bus. The ride back takes nearly three hours. The Beijing rush hour impresses the ballplayers a lot more than the Great Wall. A tour guide tries to kill time by running through every century of Beijing history. But her English is so incomprehensible that I end up as her surrogate, spreading my limited knowledge of the Bell Tower, Drum Tower and Forbidden City eunuchs to all interested parties at the back of the bus.

5:40 PM. We’re so late that I can’t get back to my hotel before the start of the evening reception, requiring “formal” attire. Having come this far, I don’t want to miss some useful interviews because of a dress code. I head down the stairs from the Grand Hyatt into the Oriental Plaza Mall. Figuring I’m a rich guest, a covey of young ladies in sprayed-on jeans accost me with the usual line of “wanting to practice their English.” I’ve been in China enough to know that they want to practice another trade. I pick up a wafer-thin leather tie, then some khaki pants. I have to wait an hour for them to be hemmed -- what a reporter won’t do for a story!

7:10 PM. And what cause would bring Jet Li and Baseball Commissioner Allen “Bud” Selig to the same rented ballroom? Baseball is hoping to reap big bucks and tonight’s glitzy party seems a down payment on plenty of souvenir sales to come. I look up from my place in the line for pot stickers and see I’m right next to Dave Winfield, a six-foot-seven Hall of Famer. Do I interview him about whether he prefers soy or chili sauce? I circulate endlessly, drink in hand, as much a pro at eavesdropping as these boys are at swinging for the fences. I run down the second-in-command of the ballplayers’ labor union, wanting to ask if a glut of cheap Chinese talent could threaten American workers in this area as well. He agrees to discuss this out at the Stadium, but I never find him there.

10:07 PM. My first Saturday night in Beijing, world capital of aimless night crawling. But the literary fest I was planning to check out has already finished, my favorite Beijing Duck purveyor is likewise closed-up and besides I’ve had too many mini-cheesecake canapés. I spot the manager of the Padres ahead of me in the Hyatt taxi line, obviously headed to some watering hole. No curfew for this club, that’s the kind I could root for. But I’m already beat and end up staggering into some Sanlitun DVD shop and stocking up on pirate art films from Brazil and the Czech Republic. Ah, the romance of China! Let the games begin!