Could baseball be the next big thing in China? Yes, at least according to Boston-based tourism executives.

In just under two months, Hainan Airlines will launch the first nonstop Boston-Beijing flight, and, in anticipation of an influx of Chinese tourists, marketing firm Attract China has been promoting Boston's Fenway Park, among other lures.

The firm has 20 employees in Beijing who have been scouring ­Weibo over the past year for clues about which parts of Boston were most interesting to Chinese. Harvard and MIT both featured prominently, but Fenway Park was No.2 on the list, at least in part due to the Green Monster, the left field wall that remains a charming part of the stadium.

With players dressed partly in red - a lucky color in China - facing the evil monster in green - a color with negative connotations - Chinese just couldn't resist, even if the game itself barely registers on the radar here.

The man tasked with changing that is Leon Xie, Major League Baseball's managing director in China, and his latest brainchild is a reality show called Perfect Pitch, which aims to spread baseball culture in the world's most populous nation. Auditions for players began over the weekend at Tsinghua University in Beijing and attracted hundreds of hopefuls.

Manny Ramirez's short-lived stint in Taiwan last year, during which league attendances were boosted fourfold, proves there is no intrinsic reason why baseball can't be successfully promoted in this part of the world.

Jim Small, the Asia head of Major League, has talked in the past about baseball's similarities to Confucianism: No clock, the team is placed before the individual, and the prevalence of threes. If Confucius says so, it's hard to disagree.

But last year, when the Chinese national team sensationally beat ­Brazil at the World Baseball Classic in Japan to earn a berth in the 2017 tournament, there was close to zero interest at home. That, sadly, is more indicative of the game's likely future in China than Xie's hope that baseball's elements of fair play, teamwork and family values can transform China's sporting landscape.

The author is a Beijing-based freelance writer. dreyermark@gmail.com