Just when professional baseball in Taiwan was teetering on the edge of striking out for good, life has once again emerged at the ballpark. Young stars are appearing, fans are returning, and politicians are showing some interest in supporting Taiwan's national game.
Taiwan's professional baseball league, founded a decade ago, has struck out--but it is bending the rules for another chance at bat. The sport once had a simpler, non-professional background that flourished here up until the 1980s, when the game was what mattered. The organization of a profitable professional league was bound to happen when the island joined the ranks of wealthy democracies, but baseball managers probably never envisioned it would become a series of trials and errors.
Things hit rock bottom in a one-two punch last fall, when two of the original four teams of the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) folded. The Mercury Tigers pulled the plug shortly after the season ended. The Weichuan Dragons followed with an announcement that they were also quitting just weeks after winning their second straight CPBL title. With Dragons fans protesting rather than celebrating in the streets, it was not the way champions usually bow out.
After suffering through years of financial losses, the teams' corporate sponsors collectively cited the "poor baseball environment" as a primary reason to drop out. The thinly veiled reference was to a 1997 game-fixing scandal that saw twenty-one star players convicted and banned from the sport. The connection between gangsters and the game has cast a shadow over the credibility of Taiwan baseball ever since.
The four remaining CPBL teams decided to stick it out after talks foundered during the winter over a possible merger with the rival Taiwan Major League (TML), a four-team circuit now in its fourth season. It's all a far cry from where professional baseball used to be five years ago, when games at the Taipei Stadium would often attract sold-out crowds of 16,000. These days, it's usually a couple of thousand fans who go to the games.
Baseball officials are optimistic, despite the empty seats. "The past couple of years haven't been very good because of the impact of gambling, but I think it has started a slow recovery this year," says Joey Chen, general manager of the Naluwan Corporation, TML's owner. The professional baseball kingpin points out three factors that are needed for the revival of the sport in Taiwan. "First, we need to develop more good young players who have glowing records in international competitions. If our games are good, the fans naturally will come to watch," he says. "Second, each team must strive to develop a fan base and work to develop a home stadium." Chen's third factor has to do with the entire environment of baseball here. "We hope that the government can promote and emphasize baseball, build new stadiums, and work on cooperation between the two leagues. If these things are done, then there is a future for the sport."
It's a tall order. A silver medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics showed Taiwan's fans that the island's players were capable of providing world-class competition when they returned to professional games back home. But the failure of the Chinese-Taipei team to qualify for the Atlanta and Sydney Olympics cast doubt that the island was still producing players worth paying to see.
A different type of international success is helping draw interest back into the game--pro players who make it big abroad. Outfielder Chen Chin-feng became the first Taiwanese player in nearly a quarter century to play with a North American major league organization when he signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers prior to the 1999 season. He did not disappoint fans with his minor league debut, earning California League MVP and being named one of the Dodgers' top prospects. In late 1999, pitcher Kuo Hung-chih followed Chen to the Dodgers, while fellow pitcher Tsao Chin-hui signed a US$2.2 million contract with the Colorado Rockies as the race to make the major leagues heated up. Moreover, two more pitchers, Hsu Ming-chieh and Tsao Chun-yang, signed with Japanese teams in 1999. Japan has been the traditional destination of Taiwan's premier sluggers.
Players who have the knack to earn a living overseas have forced fans to give the game a second look, according to Al Jones, the pitching coach for the Elephants. "With local players going to Japan and the US, it showed the talent was getting better. It opened the eyes of a lot of people, so they wanted to come in and see what was going on," says the former Chicago White Sox pitcher who first came to play in Taiwan in 1991. "They now have the idea that 'maybe we do have a little bit of talent here.'"
Cultivating the next generation of players as well as fans will certainly take time, but a reservoir of interest already exists. "The game is great, pretty awesome," says eleven-year-old Chen Huan-yu, who was throwing a ball against a wall between innings at an Elephant game. With his father, mother, and sister sitting in the stands, the student from the Taipei County city of Sanchung shared that he isn't the only youngster with ambitions to grow up to be a player. "All my classmates want to be in the big leagues. We love baseball and we also have a school team," he says.
The child was lucky to have plenty of room to toss the ball around on the concourse at spacious Hsinchuang Stadium, a modern facility that opened in 1998 in Hsinchuang, Taipei County. But other fans have been turned off by cramped, aging stadiums that can't satisfy the demands of Taiwan's increasingly sophisticated and demanding consumers to be entertained in comfort. "Most stadiums and facilities are not exactly brand new," says 40-year-old Brother Elephant fan Chuang Jen-kui of Taitung. "The government always says that it will come in and help and improve the situation, but things are the same year after year."
Fans in Taipei can only scratch their heads in wonderment at the misses the government has made to construct professional ball facilities. The capital effort to build a multipurpose domed stadium in Taipei has been stalled for decades, leaving the city's well -heeled residents to sit on bare concrete steps at Taipei Stadium, a decrepit structure which has been waiting years for a wrecking ball to put it out of its misery. Meanwhile, the city spent NT$25.8 billion (US$832.3 million) to purchase land in Tienmu, a Taipei suburb, for a 6,000-seat Tienmu Stadium. Professional games were then banned at the baseball-only facility after its February 2000 completion because of protests from neighborhood activists about the noise and crowds the sport would bring.
TML's Chen recognizes that baseball officials must be patient to win back disgruntled fans. "I think that in two or three years we will be back at least 50 or 60 percent of where we were," he says. "To bring us entirely back I think we need four or five years. But this depends on the efforts of each team to attract fans--it's important to develop home teams." This concept--home teams with loyal fans willing to give support through good and bad times--is a new one in Taiwan, where teams traditionally barnstormed across the island, hoping to attract fans in every city. But when the scandal hit and the dust cleared, the teams found they were spread too thin, with little die-hard support anywhere.
With their backs against the wall, pro baseball teams officially settled on home cities this year. The process was made easier with the two teams folding and the survivors realizing that success did not necessarily require them to be located in Taipei. The current structure has Taichung hosting TML's Taichung Agan and CPBL's Sinon Bulls. CPBL's President Lions are in Tainan, with the China Trust Whales, also a CPBL team, in Chiayi. Chiayi County, meanwhile, is home to TML's Chiayi Luka. Taipei hosts both TML's Taipei Gida and CPBL's Elephants.
While these teams try to get by with their home cities' older, more cramped facilities, the future of baseball here may be seen in the southern city of Kaohsiung. Kaohsiung County Stadium officially opened in March 2000 on the shores of Chengching Lake, giving TML's Kaohisung Fala a 22,000-seat venue any North American team would be proud to call home. A huge electronic scoreboard overlooks the outfield, while luxury boxes for VIPs are sandwiched between the upper and lower decks around the infield. Despite being a last-place team, southern Taiwan fans have flocked to the stadium, with the Fala averaging about 8,000 fans per game. The stadium has also provided Taiwan with an attractive venue to host international tournaments, such as the World Youth Championships in 1999.
The stadium's opening day also attracted an ally who could be vital to ensuring the survival of Taiwan's professional baseball--President Chen Shui-bian. In a highly symbolic gesture, Chen used the game as his first public appearance since his March 18 election. Echoing his campaign themes of ridding Taiwan of money politics and corruption, he attacked the underlying problem of the sport head on. "I refuse to allow gambling and violence to again enter the ballpark," he promised after throwing out a ceremonial pitch.
Chen also confessed that his childhood dreams had him chasing after fly balls rather than votes. "I wanted to be a baseball player when I was young," he said. "But I couldn't run fast, jump high, or throw well. I decided it would be better to be president."
The country's new leader may still get to make some big plays on the diamond from the Presidential Office. Chen is expected to proclaim 2001 the "Year of Taiwan Baseball" in recognition of the Baseball World Cup coming to Taiwan. He has also pledged to consider a formal declaration of baseball as Taiwan's national sport. Next year's tournament is expected to bring global attention, with national teams from around the world competing, including Japan, the United States, and Cuba. The biennial competition will be the first time the island has hosted hundreds of professional athletes, including the appearances of many North American Major League baseball players. The high profile competition should translate into increased local attention on the sport to see if Taiwan's players can hold their own.
TML's Chen, meanwhile, hopes that the new government can not only provide funds to build more stadiums, but also be a mediator in the bitter rivalry between the two professional leagues. This rivalry has caused the leagues to operate on parallel tracks and chase after small pools of local players and fans. "The government should encourage the two leagues to work together, everyone cooperating," he says. At the very least, the two professional leagues should play a championship series at the end of the year. "It would not only get rid of the fans' idea that there are bad feelings between the two, but it would also attract new fans to the sport."
Whether or not a Taiwan Series is staged to boost local interest, the sport is already attracting fans with a critical eye from afar. "The game is still basically the same here as it is in the United States. It just needs time to develop and get better," said John Cox, coordinator of the Pacific Rim for the New York Yankees, as he sat in Hsinchuang Stadium during a scouting trip to Taiwan. "It's all heading in the right direction. Better facilities, making it comfortable for the fans, good quality baseball. Fans will continue to come back. I think they would."
Jeffrey Wilson has covered Taiwan baseball for seven years. He is a Taiwan correspondent for Baseball America, the United States' leading magazine on college and minor league baseball. The author can be e-mailed at jwilson@qilinlaw.com.
Copyright (c) 2000 by Jeffrey Wilson.