How a Tibetan baseball player found his way to Kansas City and Rockhurst University

When DJ Suonandajie went to his first baseball practice at Rockhurst University, the center fielder from Tibet found out he wasn’t on the varsity squad.

“He’s at our practice, ready to play.” pitcher Roman Sherman said. ‘He asks Coach, ‘Can I work with you guys?’ They let him, and I was like, ‘I love this kid already.’”

Suonandajie said he wasn’t about to let his second shot at playing college baseball slip away: he has come a long way to play in Kansas City at Rockhurst.

He said he still remembers vividly when he got his first chance to play baseball: when Suonandajie was 9, a Major League Baseball scout came to his hometown in Tibet.

The previous year, the MLB signed four kids from his hometown to participate in the first development center in Wuxi, China. So Suonandajie had an inkling of what was going to happen when the scout came again the next year for the opening of the second development center in Changzhou, China.

“We did a bunch of tests,” Suonandajie said. “How far can you throw? How fast can you run? All that kind of stuff.”

Suonandajie, like many of the other Tibetan boys in his hometown, had a strong arm from throwing rocks to herd yaks, a breed of domesticated cattle adapted to high altitudes and known as slow, stubborn grazers. Suonandajie would throw rocks next to the yaks to keep them moving.

“So the (scout) told me that they were going to pick me,” Suonandajie said. “I called my mom, we signed a contract and, a few months later, I went to Changzhou.”

At the baseball development academy, Suonandajie and his baseball peers were like any other student on Monday and Tuesday. Then came a five-day stretch of practice, where Suonandajie said he fell in love with the game of baseball.

His last two years of high school, Suonandajie went to a new academy in Nanjing, where he met Kansas City product Ray Chang, a coach and former minor league infielder. Then, his first year of college, Suonandajie played for Los Angeles Harbor Community College, showing off his contact and speed skills with a .356 on-base percentage, 19 walks and 11 steals.

But when his second season was shut down due to COVID-19 and he completed his associate’s degree in May 2021, Suonandajie struggled to find another scholarship.

He worked two jobs at McDonald’s and at an Albertsons grocery store, at one point working up to 80 hours a week.

“I’ve never been a lazy person my whole life,” Suonandajie said. “So the whole idea is just to try to go somewhere and give one more shot to see how far I can go.”

That’s when the connection with Chang would come into play. A Rockhurst University alum, Chang told longtime Hawks head coach Gary Burns about Suonandajie’s situation. Burns offered Suonandajie a scholarship, and he moved to Kansas City in January.

After playing with the junior varsity squad all spring, Suonandajie joined the Ban Johnson Collegiate League, where he mans center field and bats as a switch hitter for Regal Plastic.

Any given day at Creekside Baseball Complex in Parkville, his voice can be heard even from far away center field.

“He’s always cheering on people,” Sherman said. “Like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s do it. We got it.’ If we’re in the gym, he’s always hyped. He’s just a very helpful person.”

Sherman gives Suonandajie a ride to Ban Johnson games. The pitcher and teammate has a first-hand view of Suonandajie’s work ethic: before the spring season, the two would often go to batting cages late at night, hitting until 1 a.m.

If professional baseball doesn’t work out, Suonandajie, who is going into his senior year, eventually wants to become a baseball coach in China, perhaps even working as a coach for the development camps where he was raised. Sherman has no doubt that he’ll be a good coach.

“As a coach, you’re the one who builds the structure,” Sherman said. “He’s a structured guy: dedicated to the game, dedicated to the gym and dedicated to school.”

This story was originally published July 12, 2022 at 5:00 AM.