Breaking News, World News and Taiwan News.

Updated Friday, October 30, 2009 9:12 am TWN, The China Post news staff

Should Taiwan keep its professional baseball league?

What can the authorities do to satisfy six out of every ten baseball fans who are fed up with false or make-believe play? Very little. First and foremost, players have to be made all but immune to the carrot-and-stick manipulation by the mob. To do so requires a massive increase in pay for them, which currently is less than one twentieth that for Japanese professional players. Wang Chien-ming, the New York Yankees pitcher, easily makes more than NT$100 million (US$3 million) a year, nearly 100 times that of any star Elephant or Bear hurler.

Police have to protect players the best they can, too. We doubt our law-enforcement officers can do that. Moreover, a gangster can destroy the fingers of a pitcher and get away with a sentence of months for “bodily injury.” The mob has no dearth of “executioners.” Pitchers threatened probably have no option but to submit. All this shows our CPBL, even given a new lease on life, may still be plagued by scandals. Fans are compelled to live with perennial scandals. Can President Ma Ying-jeou, the Mister Clean, tolerate the corruption in our national sport, with which his wife is in love?

Another option open to us is to make professional baseball history. We can dedicate our time and money to the promotion of amateur baseball, which we did in the 1970s. A schoolchildren's baseball team, the Golden Dragons of Taichung, won the Little League world championships in Williamsport, Pa., on August 24, 1968. That touched off a baseball boom in Taiwan, making Little League games the most popular spectator sport on the island. Taiwan boys have since won 22 pennants at Williamsport and many Junior League world championships at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Taiwan's baseballers won silver medals in the Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992. There were no professional players on our Chinese Taipei team.

　　We believe Taiwan can repeat the feats if we do really put our mind to it. Fans will be satisfied. All that the authorities have to do is to help take care of those players at the end of their amateur career. It won't be too difficult, for there are a large number of private enterprises, many of them multinationals that can afford sinecure jobs for the retired amateur players, who after all can do some work which is needed to be done, for they are still quite young.

1|2

Share

Print

Email


Sponsors
▪	Save 70% for hotel in Shanghai and 6000 hotels, in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and all China.
▪	Get the best deals for Guangzhou Hotels or choose from more than 10,000 hotels in 499 Chinese cities.
▪	Find great real time deals on China Flights. Book flights to China or China domestic flights 24/7.
▪	Buy china wholesale products from reliable chinese wholesalers on DHgate.com!