The baseball team redefining what it means to be young and Vietnamese

Baseball isn’t something you readily associate with Vietnam. But a new generation of young, Hanoi-based baseball fanatics has set up the region’s very first team. Their head coach? YouTube. Photographer Travis Hodges heads to the game.

It’s game day for the Hanoi Fishanu baseball team. I venture into the city in search of a ride to the field and, more importantly, a pregame coffee. There’s no shortage of scooters (or coffee) in Hanoi, so when you book a ride from Grab—a local Uber equivalent—it’s not a car that collects you.

My driver arrives, hands me a spare helmet, and we speed off through the city on a white-knuckle ride including pavement shortcuts and near-constant blaring of the horn.

I arrive at the baseball diamond, which just so happens to be the only one in all of northern Vietnam, and find it overshadowed by an enormous, gleaming building complex—a symbol, if ever there was one, of a country expanding at breakneck speed.