Scaling the Great Wall. (Insider: Baseball).

Without appearing to jump more than a few inches, Yao Ming can thrust basketballs over giants and through rims. Now we'll see if he can roust Old Man Baseball merely by being Yao Ming.

When the 7-5 Yao performed for the Rockets in a pedestrian NBA game, nearly 300 million of his Chinese countrymen viewed the telecast. Presumably a comparable number of Chinese ultimately would watch if one of their own pitched for the Mariners or batted for the Yankees.

"China is really the big prize for professional and amateur sports," says Dan Okimoto, a Stanford University professor who is the school's director emeritus for the Asia Pacific Research Center and is a regular visitor to China. "Even if 25 percent of China's population were attracted to baseball, you'd have 300 million, which gives you a fan base bigger than the size of the United States."

Unlike some of its neighbors, notably Japan, China never has caught baseball fever. With Yao's giant step forward onto the American pro sports landscape, however, perhaps Major League Baseball owners will begin the journey of far more than a thousand miles and cultivate the world's last great untapped market.

Other tasks could be more appealing to Bud Selig's band of owners, who seem more interested in demonizing the Yankees and convincing fans the industry is losing money. But for those owners who aren't turned off by China's considerable human-rights abuses, now could be the time to embrace the world's most populous country, where per capita income is expected to double in the next eight years.

In March, China will launch its first professional baseball league, designed to prepare a team that can qualify for the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Yao has created his own cultural revolution, and several Taiwanese baseball players in U.S. farm systems could inspire China to push for rapid baseball development. Taiwan is home to ethnic Chinese and is of keen interest to China. A player such as Taiwanese pitcher Chin-Hui Tsao, a Rockies prospect with star potential, could convince many Chinese boys to don baseball uniforms.