Left field

Taiwan set to strike baseball ‘mafia’ as fans sulk

Taiwan’s flagship sport is unravelling like an old rotted baseball, a university graduate said, reflecting the public mood of the moment, as she and I waited at a news conference for the cabinet spokesman to emerge with an official response to an illegal betting scandal.

The case, far from over, has put six people in jail and pointed fingers at eight more, including two of the island’s best known pitchers, since it was announced in the final days of October after months of investigation.

Taiwan, population 23 million, wants to be an international player, rivalling South Korea and Japan in Asian baseball. Then from 2008 it lost twice to baseball upstart and political rival China, prompting calls for reform. As part of a broader baseball reform package, the government pledged to stamp out illegal gambling rings that pay players to throw impossible pitches or drop easy fly balls to make bets come true as the Chicago White Sox players did in 1919.

As the anti-gambling campaign got underway, a massive mafia-driven betting scheme unfolded throughout the Chinese Professional Baseball League (www.cpbl.com.tw) summer season, a local prosecutor said. Among the eight suspects are former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Tsao Chin-hui, a household name among Taiwan fans, and former Chinese Taipei (effectively a national team) pitcher Chang Chih-chia.

Fans stunned by nonstop broadcasts of the latest betting scandal and put off by the losses to China have turned to televised U.S. major league games, killing off the local league’s TV viewership. Basketball is on the rise among younger folk who haven’t picked a favoured sport. 

“Some fans might even start watching amateur baseball,” said Yu Jun-wei, author and assistant professor at a Taiwan sports university. “This case could have a huge impact on the whole professional league.”

The college grad waxed on about the Red Leaf Junior Baseball Team, legendary for beating a Japanese rival in 1968 and giving the sport’s first big boost in Taiwan. Glory days that are gone for how long?

Its baseball star fallen, Taiwan scopes alternatives

A chain of injuries suffered by New York Yankees star Wang Chien-ming is pushing a pair of more obscure Taiwan-born U.S. Major League Baseball pitchers into the limelight as dejected fans grudgingly seek alternatives.

Fans in baseball-crazy Taiwan, though far from giving up on Wang, say they are looking harder at Ni Fu-te and Kuo Hong-chih. But unlike Wang, a starting pitcher responsible for winning games, the other two are relief pitchers and neither is quite a superhero.

Wang, so famous in Taiwan that his jersey number, 40, is synonymous with his name, before 2008 was a league sensation whose sinker balls had earned him a 54-23 career win-loss record and a line-up of product sponsorships in Taiwan. Wang sat out much of the past two seasons.

“To say that Wang Chien-ming will be replaced by these other two because he was injured, I wouldn’t go that far, but Taiwan’s Yankees viewership has been affected,” said Kang Cheng-nan, a physical education teacher at National Taiwan University. ”The other two need to be monitored for longer, but if they do well, fans will watch.”

Marginalised by giant economic powerhouse China, which claims sovereignty over the small, self-ruled Taiwan, the west Pacific island looks to its heroes for international recognition or for a sign that it can do something right overseas.

One of the alternative Taiwan-born players, left-hander Ni of the Detroit Tigers  was described by the Major League Baseball website as a “valuable piece” of the team’s relief pitching staff since he debuted in June. Ni, 26, ended the 2009 season, his first in the U.S. major leagues, with a respectable earned run average (ERA) of 2.61, sparking Taiwan’s celeb-obsessed media to mention his name.

Kuo, 28, of the Los Angeles Dodgers has a reputation for staying in play after five seasons despite four shoulder operations. He finished the 2009 season with a solid ERA of 3.0, and his name has appeared in commercials in Taiwan.

Taiwan revels in baseball revenge

A photo caption by Taiwan’s Central News Agency on Tuesday says it all: ”Taiwan gets revenge.”

The agency elaborates in its story about a baseball game on Monday between Taiwan’s Chinese Taipei team and China.

China, though economically and militarily dominant, has never been a baseball powerhouse while Chinese Taipei is seen as a major team in Asia. “Taiwan slaughtered China 13-1…wiping out a grievance resulting from humiliating defeats to China in the 2008 Beijing Olympics and World Baseball Classic in March,” CNA wrote.

Taiwan‘s resulting silver medal at the amateur-level Asian Baseball Championship in Japan raises hopes that it can compose a winning team for the higher-profile Asian Games next year in China. 

But what matters most is now is erasing memories of the close but shocking 8-7 loss to China at the 2008 Beijing Olympics followed by a 4-1 loss to the same team in the March 2009 World Baseball Classic, the media remind Taiwan.

“China is a big country. It’s getting stronger,” said Andrew Yang, a professor who specialises in China studies at National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan. “At the last Olympics, we performed badly, so people consider this a make-even in a way, meaning we still have potential to be one of the best teams in Asia.”

World Games: Hidden gold for those who look, laugh

Reporters covering matches between the planet’s top tug-of-war teams at the 2009 World Games in Taiwan this past week would work from the press box of a middle school gymnasium cooled by ceiling fans and run by six volunteers with nothing to do but make sure the computer lines worked.

The actual battleground was the school’s field; a sell-out crowd of about 300 sat on the school’s bleachers after paying just $3 per ticket. International World Games Association officials watched from a lean-to on the grass.

Across town at a wooded art museum campus, the venue for world-class orienteering, reporters could get so close to competitors that one had to take special care to avoid the scribes while sprinting for hidden objects. Fans sat on benches next to the sweaty contestants, close enough to ask questions or take sharp photos of the medal ceremony.

These are snapshots from the 2009 World Games, a quadrennial sub-Olympic event that unites 31 sports that lack global appeal today but have a shot at actual Olympic admission as early as 2016.

It’s no small deal for Kaohsiung, the obscure Taiwan industrial city that has played up the July 16-26 event over the past year to vie for international attention.

But because most of the sports — korfball or flying disc, for example — are still struggling to make a mark in everyday conversation, nevermind the Olympics, the World Games was a picnic compared to other international sporting events, which are usually as packed and heavily controlled as big-name concerts. (more…)

World Games proves a tough sell for Taiwan

After the globe giggled at Athens in 2004 for letting swathes of Olympics seats go empty, organisers of the far more obscure 2009 World Games in equally obscure Taiwan are doing whatever it takes to pack the venues for such unlikely events as billiards and beach handball. Tug-of-war, anyone?

Whatever it takes, in this case, includes selling seats to China. World Games host city Mayor Chen Chu travelled there on Thursday for a four-day visit, intending to sell the 90 percent of events tickets that are unclaimed so far before the curtain goes up on July 16.

Chen is a leading figure in a Taiwan opposition party that wants formal independence for self-ruled Taiwan, which mighty Beijing claims as its own for historical reasons and has threatened to take by force.

But she’s also “realistic and pragmatic,” to quote Taiwan political scientist Andrew Yang. She knows Beijing can use its authoritarian rule to send hordes of travel-hungry Chinese tourists to the World Games, quickly quashing any Athens-style absenteeism.

“You can’t ignore such a large group of the world’s public, and her polls have shown that some people in her city support more contact with China,” said Kou Chien-wen, a politics professor in Taipei.

Chen plans to market the 300,000 World Games tickets and her normally uneventful city Kaohsiung to countries besides China, but who else will have the power or interest in packing her stadiums?

PHOTO: Kaohsiung mayor Chen Chu (L) presents an invitation of the 2009 World Games to her Beijing counterpart Guo Jinlong during their meeting in Beijing May 21, 2009. REUTERS/China Daily

Taiwan limps along with fallen baseball hero

People are praying in Taiwan for baseball pitcher Wang Chien-ming.

The guy isn’t dead, despite a few alarmist banner headlines, but over the past month he has pushed Taiwan’s collective sadness to code blue levels.

Wang, a Taiwan-born Major League Baseball pitcher for the New York Yankees, wrecked his first three games of the 2009 season after sitting out most of last year with a foot injury.

On April 18 he led the team to a stunningly lopsided 4-22 demise against the Cleveland Indians, days after a 5-15 debacle against Tampa Bay. Before last year Wang was a league sensation whose sinker balls have earned him a 54-23 career win-loss record and a line-up of product sponsorships in Taiwan. Now he’s suddenly back on the disabled list with an abductor muscle weakness, raising fears that last year’s injury might not have fully healed.

That’s like saying Taiwan itself has lost and gone limp. “To see him do this in the United States puts us in a deep depression,” Taipei fan Eming Chung said.

Marginalised by giant economic powerhouse China, which claims sovereignty over the small, self-ruled west Pacific island, Taiwan looks to its heroes for international recognition or for a sign that it can do something right overseas. Taiwan has produced internationally known performers in track, tennis and board games, but none compare to baseball, the de facto official sport.

World Games bring spotlight to southern Taiwan

2008 was undoubtedly China’s year in the limelight, thanks to the Beijing Olympics. But this year, China’s longtime political and diplomatic rival Taiwan gets the World Games

And it’s not Taiwan’s frenetic, fashionable capital Taipei which will be hosting the event. Instead, the island’s second largest city and one of the world’s busiest ports, Kaohsiung, will be home to the 16-26 July extravaganza.

The World Games, held under the patronage of the International Olympic Committee, is for some of the sports which don’t make the cut for the Olympics. That includes billiards, tug of war, sumo, squash, water skiing and even life saving.

“For the spectators, at the venues as well as in front of TV sets, the particular fascinations of The World Games are found in watching these athletes compete in sports of a kaleidoscopic variety that is without match in the entire Olympic Movement,” is how the organisation describes the event.

What I have found most fascinating is the preparations Kaohsiung has been making for the Games, particularly as I covered the Beijing Olympics and the run-up to it.

Beijing was beset by problems, all well-documented, including worries over pollution, media freedom, the poor foreign language skills of its citizens and many, many other issues, though in the end it all went off more or less smoothly.

Having been to Kaohsiung many times over the past decade and several times over the last few months, I have been fascinated to observe their build-up.