From Killing Fields to Baseball Fields

A new pastime in Cambodia

Thanks to a wandering expatriate, the "Killing Fields" of Cambodia are being replaced by baseball fields. And thanks to the good folks at Major League Baseball International, sandlots are replacing the specter of Pol Pot, a dictator who once ruled over all that murder and mayhem.

Baseball, heretofore an aberration in the once war-torn Southeast Asian land, is a budding institution.

"Nobody in Cambodia ever heard of baseball," said Joe Cook, the expatriate who escaped to the United States as a child and as an adult ultimately brought the grand game to his native country. "They didn't know it existed."

Cook was 12 years old in 1984 when his family fled a country ravaged by the Khmer Rouge, which tried by force to institute an egalitarian Communist peasant society after the war in Vietnam and Cambodia ended. From 1975-79, two million people died of overwork, exhaustion or execution -- nearly 25 percent of the total population.

Baseball has magical healing powers. I wouldn't be surprised to see this sport take off like it has in Japan and Korea.