It’s the American pastime. It’s as American as apple pie.
For nearly 200 years, from 20 years before the Civil War, baseball has been associated with the United States. One of our first unique sports, that’s been so beloved since its inception that still, even in the modern era, it overwhelmingly leads all domestic sports leagues in total attendance.
Baseball has been a unifying force since its inception, leading to some of the most iconic moments in U.S. sports history. Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier and helping pave the way for other integration in domestic sports competitions. Willie Mays’ catch in center field at the Polo Grounds. Babe Ruth’s “called shot,” which became a national legend starting in 1932.
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Star baseball players like Ted Williams left the sport in the middle of their careers to join the armed forces in World War II. Lou Gehrig’s iconic speech to the Yankee Stadium crowd regarding his ALS diagnosis, “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
Yes, the NFL has become the most popular sports league in the country, but nothing inspires the level of regional fan dedication like baseball. Little League is something of a rite of passage for young boys, and virtually every town in America has a baseball field.
It’d be reasonable to assume, then, that the iconic companies who supply baseball equipment at both the youth and professional level would be, well, American. It’d be reasonable, yes, but unfortunately, it’d also be inaccurate. And that reality is an unfortunate symptom of a much bigger and broader problem.
Two of the most prolific baseball equipment manufacturers, known for over 100 years of making gloves and bats, are Wilson and Louisville Slugger. While many competitors have entered the space in recent years, a look across any baseball field, with children or adults playing, and you’ll find Wilson gloves and equipment, and hitters using Louisville Slugger bats.
A number of star players, including Ronald Acuna Jr., Kyle Schwarber, Pete Crow-Armstrong, and Will Smith, use Louisville Slugger bats. Clayton Kershaw famously used a Wilson glove his entire career.
Louisville Slugger was founded in the 1880s, Wilson sporting goods just before the start of World War I. They’re American companies, making sporting equipment for the most American of sports. Or at least, they were. Now? Both are owned by a company with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Seriously.
For most of the company’s existence, Louisville Slugger was owned and operated by the Hillerich & Bradsby Company, founded in the 1800s to make baseball equipment. In 2015 though, the family-owned business, still in the Hillerich family, was essentially forced to sell.
CEO John A. Hillerich IV said at the time that he had effectively no choice because they weren’t able to compete with mega, multinational companies that had entered the equipment space with much larger resources. They sold to Wilson, another company that started as a family business before being sold to an international conglomerate.
As far back as 1989, Wilson was sold to Amer Sports, a Finnish multinational manufacturer of athletic equipment. But in 2018, Amer itself was purchased by one of the largest athletic companies on earth, Anta Sports. Anta, a Chinese company, then by extension took over control of Wilson and Louisville Slugger.
So who is Anta? Well, that’s where the symptom of a bigger and broader problem comes into play.
Anta is a relatively new business, founded in 1991, with the express goal of becoming the biggest athletic company on earth. Already, they’re the third largest such company behind only Nike and Adidas. How’d they get so big, so quickly? The typical story of Chinese businesses: they copied Western companies.
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Because manufacturing in China is so much cheaper than other countries, thanks to their poor working conditions and low wages, companies began outsourcing production to Anta, and companies like it, as globalization ramped up in recent decades. And as a BBC story on the company explains, they take advantage by uh, borrowing, “fundamentals of managing the business,” as well as design and development techniques.
So companies like Nike hire Anta to make their shoes, designed and developed in the United States, in order to save some money, and Anta then copies their designs, manufacturing tolerances, and processes. Sure enough, a few years later, Anta is far outselling Nike in their home market, opening up stores in Los Angeles, and the “saving money” backfires when international sales tank.
Anta, with their global ambition to become the dominant company in the athletic space, expanded to buy Amer, and now by extension, controls two of the most iconic American businesses. That’s bad enough, but Anta is heavily integrated with the Chinese Communist Party.
As just one example, in 2019, the company suspended contract negotiations with the NBA after then-Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey retweeted support of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. In 2021, Anta’s billionaire owner announced that the company would donate $1.2 billion worth of shares to a “charity.”
That charity, was, like virtually any large business in China, intimately connected to the CCP. A Forbes report from the time explained it, “As inherently Chinese companies, both ANTA and LiNing will thus likely remain loyal to the CCP’s understanding of human rights, especially as their domestic revenues dwarf anything they earn abroad.”
Does that sound like the type of company that Americans want buying into youth and professional sports?
It’s easy to wonder how this happened; how did it get to a point where a company indistinguishable from the Chinese government is controlling the manufacturing of equipment used by millions of young and professional athletes. But as is all too often the case, it’s a series of inevitable consequences to short-sided thinking.
Companies that wanted to cut costs in the 1990s and 2000s by outsourcing to China are now being replaced in one of the world’s largest markets by businesses that copied their designs and methodologies. Ultimately harming their bottom line in 2026 and beyond. Nike, in particular, has seen its share price collapse.
Smaller family businesses have little hope of vying against well-heeled multinational corporations, who themselves are eventually swallowed up by Chinese outlets able to outcompete on costs and local forcing functions.
Anta might be allowing Wilson and Louisville to operate as they did before. But for how long? How many other legendary companies will face a similarly depressing fate? Much like iconic businesses in London, such as Harrods, that are now owned by Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, American traditions are slowly being swallowed up by companies and countries that often have views antithetical to the US and the West.
Given how Major League Baseball celebrated America’s 250th anniversary early this year, it’s a miracle Anta hasn’t pulled Wilson and Louisville out of protest. Maybe we shouldn’t give them any ideas.
