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Health & Fitness

Is America's Favorite Pastime a Jaded Taiwanese Tradition?

The rabid baseball-infused fall fever has subsided, and the holiday season is now in full bloom. It is hard to believe that The Autumn Classic ended just over a month ago. Yankees and Mets fans which dominate the Essex County area suffered another year of disappointment. 

Nonetheless, Boston and St. Louis, in what was for the most part a thrilling six game series, still captured an average of 17 million viewers per game. The last decade of steroid involved controversy has certainly created a decline in views since the 80s and 90s, but a regionally diverse league of 30 teams still gives the legendarily scandalous and cherished sport something to be proud of. It gives the Land of the Free something that many of us, may in fact, take for granted. This is even true if you are a frustrated, emotionally battered Mets fan like myself; my time in a land far away has in reality made me acknowledge how lucky American baseball fans are.

Such a fortress of fanship and teams to choose from is not even available, say, in the home country of Baltimore Orioles pitcher Wei-Yin Chen. Taiwan, the island off of China in which I currently reside, has just over 23 million people in a land that is roughly 1600 square miles. That is, indeed, nearly triple the population of New Jersey, a state that is more than five times the physical size of Mr. Chen’s land of origin. In West Orange, it seems an impossibility to experience a life more inundated with people than in the most densely populated state in America. It also seems implausible for not just Garden State natives, but all Americans alike, to imagine a baseball league as rotted with gossip and dishonor as the Major Leagues. Taiwan, however, proves both of these assumptions to be mistaken.

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 The Chinese Professional Baseball League has seen its heyday of scandals that make anything from A-Rod’s recent accusations to Shoeless Joe Jackson look like microscopic fragments of small potatoes. While the CPBL has only been active since 1989, the laundry list of controversial events since the mid 90s have more than made up for lost time.

The tone was set in the Summer of 1996. While the Brother Elephants, a team based in New Taipei City, stayed in a Taichung hotel, chaos ensued. Gangsters entered the players’ room, armed with weapons, and demanded five Brother Elephant players to purposely shape the outcome of upcoming games. While the players did not cave and notified law enforcement, this was merely the eye of a corruption-inflicted baseball storm to come.

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By the winter of 1997, multiple league players were arrested and convicted of fixing games, many of whom came from the China Times Eagles. This gave rise to gang-pressured scandals of other teams such as the Mercuries Tigers and Wehuan Dragons. The Tigers, just a year after the Taichung hotel incident, were too threatened with weapons by gambling gangsters. The next two years of the CPBL were dominated by such tactics, and by the Spring of ’99 the Dragons’ manager was assaulted outside of his home.

Through the ugliness, it would be comforting to say that the end of the 90s signaled the end of such scenarios that made Pete Rose look like a girl scout. Nonetheless, the 2000s were still filled with similar horrors. The most recent made headlines in the fall of 2009; just one day after the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions were awarded their sixth League championship, players and the manager were questioned, and in time arrested for manipulating the outcomes of games.

It is for these reasons that, despite Taiwan’s vast flood of people in such a tiny area, a fact that would seemingly create a variety of teams to choose from, it is now only  left with a measly four. Seven teams in just over three decades of baseball have been expelled from the league, or have crumbled due to finance problems in the wake of convictions.

Despite the dreadful history lesson just mentioned, I enjoyed myself in game 1 of the 2013 Taiwan Series. I consider myself fortunate to have gotten a ticket, though it may come as no surprise that seats are somewhat easy to obtain. One can pop into the 7-Eleven and purchase tickets through a machine, and, while the closest seating areas were sold out, I still had next to no trouble purchasing a championship series ticket for less than $10.00. I have been told and seen on television that regular season games are often empty enough to hear a pin drop. For this series, though, the crowds were certainly respectable. Flashes of Lions fans' neon orange, and Rhinos fans’ purple were constantly at odds.

The Rhinos, who had made their first play-off berth, let alone championship appearance, had been assisted by the presence of MLB star Manny Ramirez for the first half of their season. The presence of a distinguished American player had perhaps boosted ratings this year, and game 1’s opening pitch by Taiwanese drama actress Sonia Sui lifted the eyes of fans as they do when celebrities throw out the balls in MLB games. Patterns of inflated sticks smacked together, irritatingly rhythmic blow horns screeched in unison, and there were options of cold beer, tea, hot dogs, and pork chops over rice. The aura was almost the same as it is back home.

I watched the CPBL powerhouse Lions win the first game in person, after trailing 2-0, leading 10-3, and settling for 10-7. I then watched them, via television, win the next three games to take the series. I gained respect for the CPBL, and look forward to following it in the 2014 season.

From humble beginnings, baseball first made its way into this tiny island in 1906, when Japanese colonists started up a league. Taiwanese players did not truly participate until the 1920s, but it did not take long before it made a positive mark on the people and atmosphere of this wonderful Formosa. In the same way that America will always share a cultural identity with her beloved past-time, so too will Taiwan, 11 teams deep or four standing.  It goes without saying, though, that its recent history of corruption will take some time to get through, and that it may be some time before the CPBL sees some expansions. It was by game 3 of this past Taiwan Series, after all, that Rhinos second baseman Lin Tsung-nan let a ball roll between his legs. It was not soon after that you could hear whispers in the streets, on the trains, and around the island, that perhaps “he was bought.”

If one thing is for certain, though, you cannot buy culture, whether it be on the humid shorelines of Formosa in the height of the mid-autumn festival, or the Main Street corridor during the West Orange annual tree lighting. Scandals may penetrate sincerity, but they can never crush tradition.




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