Under different circumstances, Major League Baseball’s new Manhattan headquarters would have played host Thursday to the third annual Asians in Sports and Culture Symposium, in accordance with Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

But given the coronavirus pandemic, MLB’s Asian business resource group (BRG) -- a collection of employees committed to raising the visibility of Asian professionals in sports -- alongside similar groups from the NBA and NFL, co-hosted a virtual panel entitled “Representation Matters,” with over 200 attendees from across the industry, including the NHL, USTA and MLS.

The panel included four prominent scholars from across the country who gave individual presentations on the influential role sports play in the Asian American community: Dr. Kathleen Yep, professor of Asian American studies at Pitzer College (of the Claremont Colleges); Dr. Chia Youyee Vang, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Dr. Ryan Reft, historian with the Library of Congress; and Dr. Stanley Thangaraj, assistant professor of anthropology at City College of New York.

Thangaraj is also a co-author of the book that served as a template for the discussion, "Asian American Sporting Cultures," which considers how identities and communities are culturally negotiated on sporting fields.

Jim Small, MLB's senior vice president, international, and the Asian BRG executive director, served as the virtual event’s keynote speaker. In 2003, Small moved to Tokyo with his wife and three young children to open the league’s first offices in Asia, which he called “a two-year assignment that turned into a 16-year experience of a lifetime.”

Small’s oldest son, who was 7 when the family moved abroad, began playing baseball with the local club, and it helped him learn how to acclimate to Japanese culture. That made Small think about the similar journey Japanese Major Leaguers have undertaken when they come to the United States.

Before the likes of Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui and Hideo Nomo, who Small said arrived at a time when “we as a company and as an industry welcomed them and prepared the way for them,” the first Japanese ballplayer to enter the Majors was Masanori “Mashi” Murakami with the San Francisco Giants in 1964.

“Things were very different then. There was no sushi in the clubhouse, there was no interpreter, there was no Japan society waiting for him when he went to Cincinnati or St. Louis to celebrate,” Small said. “Less than 20 years after the end of World War II, you think about how there were a lot of people in the stands who weren’t ready to see a Japanese ballplayer playing Major League Baseball, and they let him know it.

“But just like my son, Mashi loved baseball, and he wouldn’t quit. He learned to speak English, he learned to eat Western food. … And he adjusted to the point where, in his words, it was an opportunity of a lifetime.”

Coincidentally, that opportunity came from the work of a Japanese American man named Tsuneo “Cappy” Harada, as noted by Reft. A semi-professional ballplayer, Harada, like many Japanese Americans, was caught up in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and ended up in the U.S. military as internment camps began to emerge across the nation.

In the postwar period, Harada became an ambassador for the sport, pioneering relationships between MLB and the Japanese leagues while striking deals for American-born players to go on tours abroad and for Japanese players, like Murakami, to join teams in the U.S.

“The larger point here is, despite the fact that a lot of Japanese Americans had their dreams scuttled by internment and the war and never got to really enjoy the big show, the sport remains integral to their identity and to their experience as both Japanese and Japanese Americans,” Reft said. “And so, you don’t always have to have stars for something to matter to people.”

To that end, Thanagaraj raised the point of how prominent sports figures of different races and ethnicities aren’t always remembered by history to the same degree.

“We also have to be really aware of the ways in which we are celebrating people like Jackie Robinson, Colin Kaepernick, Tommy Smith and other important black men, [and] we fail to account for Asian American men,” Thanagaraj said.

All of the panelists agreed that, ultimately, having the opportunity to exist as Asian Americans in sports is the key, but that’s its own hurdle to climb.

“Organized sports in American society has been so costly for so many families, and that’s a huge barrier,” Vang said. “By the time you get to high school, kids from athletic families have already been trained for six, seven, eight years, and then you have a lot of immigrant kids in particular who can’t afford to pay $2,000 a year to have their child in an organized sport. So it’s a tremendous disadvantage.”

“We must mitigate the social determinants of participation and access,” Yep added. “And we have to ask ourselves, whatever role we’re in, what are we doing to create more equity in sports and meaning-making of sports?”

Small, as the panel’s sole league representative, acknowledged how integral it is to make inroads into communities and create space for minorities in sports, and he assured the virtual event’s attendees that the work is being done.

“[MLB has] really focused on the underserved communities in our country,” Small said. "Baseball can be expensive -- travel baseball, equipment, all of that stuff. What we have decided is to go a different route and work with National Conference of Mayors and various organizations in different markets where we can actually put baseball into afterschool programs or wherever we’re able to get that exposure and get the kids playing. It doesn’t matter where they’re from, boys, girls.

“I’m really excited to say that right now not only is baseball the No. 1 participation sport in the United States again, it’s also the fastest growing. So clearly a league can focus on that and can choose to make a difference.”