Two Iconic American Baseball Equipment Brands Now Owned by a Chinese Company Linked to CCP

Wilson and Louisville Slugger, two American baseball brands, are now controlled by Anta Sports, a Chinese company with deep ties to the CCP.

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This is the American pastime. It's about the size of American apple pie.

For nearly 200 years, starting 20 years before the Civil War, baseball has been associated with the United States. One of our first unique sports, it has been so popular since its inception that it still, even in modern times, decisively leads all domestic sports leagues in viewership.

Baseball has been a unifying force since its inception, leading to some of the most iconic moments in US sports history. Jackie Robinson is breaking the color barrier and helping pave the way for other integrations into indoor sports. Hunting Willie Mays in center field at the Polo Grounds. Babe Ruth's "Called Shot," which has become a national legend since 1932.

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Star baseball players like Ted Williams left the sport mid-career to join the armed forces in World War II. Lou Gehrig's iconic speech to the Yankee Stadium crowd upon his ALS diagnosis, "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on earth."

Yes, the NFL has become the most popular sports league in the country, but nothing inspires the same level of dedication from area fans as baseball. Little league is something of a rite of passage for young boys, and almost every town in America has a baseball field.

So it's reasonable to assume that the iconic companies that supply baseball equipment at both the youth and professional levels will be American. It makes sense, yes, but unfortunately, it would also be imprecise. And this fact is an unfortunate symptom of a much larger and wider 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, look at any baseball field, kid or adult, and you'll find Wilson gloves and gear and hitters wielding Louisville Slugger bats.

A number of star players, including Ronald Acuna Jr., Kyle Schwarber, Pete Crowe-Armstrong and Will Smith, use Louisville Slugger bats. Clayton Kershaw used Wilson's glove throughout his career.

Louisville Slugger was founded in the 1880s, Wilson's Sporting Goods just before the outbreak of World War I. They are American companies that make sports 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

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For most of the company's history, the Louisville Slugger was owned by Hillerich & Bradsby, which was founded in the 1800s to manufacture baseball equipment. However, in 2015, the family business, still in the family of Hilrich Buddhasasa, had to sell

CEO John A. Hillerich IV said at the time that he had virtually no choice because they were unable to compete with the large, multinational companies that had entered the equipment space with far greater resources. They sold to Wilson, another company that started as a family business before being sold to an international company.

In 1989, Wilson was sold to Amer Sports, a Finnish multinational sports equipment manufacturer. But in 2018, Aamir was bought by one of the biggest sports companies on earth, Anta Sports. Anta, a Chinese company, then took control of Wilson and the Louisville Slugger.

So who is Anta? Well, this is where the symptom of a bigger and more widespread problem appears.

Anta is a relatively new business that was founded in 1991 and aims to become the largest sports company on earth. Currently, they are the third largest such company behind Nike and Adidas. How did they grow so fast? The usual story of Chinese businesses: they copied Western companies.

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Because manufacturing in China is much cheaper than in other countries, due to poor working conditions and low wages, companies began to outsource production to Anta and companies like it as globalization increased in recent decades. And as a BBC story about the company explains, they take advantage of borrowing, "business management fundamentals" as well as design and development techniques.

So companies like Nike hire Anta to make their shoes designed and developed in the US to save some money, and Anta then copies their designs, manufacturing tolerances and processes. Sure enough, a few years later, Anta was outselling Nike in its home market, opened stores in Los Angeles, and "saving money" backfires when the reservoir is international.

Anta, with its global ambitions to become the dominant company in the sports space, expanded to buy Amer and now, by extension, controls two of America's most iconic businesses. It'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 Houston Rockets GM Daryl Murray retweeted his support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. In 2021, Anta's billionaire owner announced that the company would donate $1.2 billion of its stock to a "charity."

That charity, like almost every big business in China, had close ties to the CCP. A Forbes report at the time explained: "As intrinsically Chinese companies, both ANTA and LiNing are likely to remain loyal to the CCP's understanding of human rights, especially since their domestic revenues dwarf anything they earn abroad."

Does this sound like the kind of company that Americans want to buy into for youth and professional sports?

It is easy to wonder how this happened. How did it get to the point where a company unrecognizable from the Chinese government controls the production of equipment used by millions of young and professional athletes? But as is often the case, this is an inevitable consequence of short-term thinking.

Companies that sought to cut costs by outsourcing to China in the 1990s and 2000s have now been replaced in one of the world's largest markets by companies copying their designs and methods. It will ultimately hurt their bottom line in 2026 and beyond. Nike, in particular, has seen its stock price plummet.

Smaller family businesses have little hope of competing with well-mannered multinationals, which themselves will eventually be swallowed up by Chinese media that are able to compete on locally mandated costs and functions.

Anta may let Wilson and Louisville continue as before. But for how long? How many other legendary companies will meet a similarly tragic fate? Like iconic businesses in London, such as Harrods, now owned by Middle East sovereign wealth funds, American traditions are slowly being swallowed up by companies and countries that often hold anti-US and anti-Western views.

Considering how Major League Baseball celebrated America's 250th birthday earlier this year, it's a miracle Ante Wilson and Louisville haven't been kicked out of the protest. Maybe we shouldn't give them any ideas.

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