Los Angeles Dodgers Peter O'Malley began reaching out in 1980 by starting clinics in China and South Korea, building baseball fields in two Chinese cities, and in 1998 becoming the first major league team to open an office in Asia. The Dodgers were the second team to start a Japanese player in recent history, pitcher Hideo Nomo, the first team to start a South Korean player, pitcher Chan Ho Park, and the first Taiwanese player, Chin-Feng Chen. In addition, they were the first team to send out three Asian pitchers, from different Asian countries, in one game: Park, Hong-Chih Kuo of Taiwan, and
Robert Whiting extensively on current issues impacting both Nippon Professional Baseball and Major League Baseball, including a four-part series, which was published in the "Japan Times", followed by an in-depth series on Sadaharu Oh, Trey Hillman, Bobby Valentine and Hideo Nomo for the same paper. In October 2011, he wrote a three-part series for "The Japan Times" on the talented, but troubled, Japanese pitcher Hideki Irabu, who had died in California two months earlier of an apparent suicide. In a shifting era of globalization, Whiting is one of the few sports experts to explore the transnational flows of athletics. In his works