Taiwan Baseball

Baseball has been in Taiwan since Japanese time, the first game was played in 1906.  It's been especially popular since the success of the Taiwan Little Leaguers in the 1970s. It's one of the few institutions that unite all Taiwanese. It so important the Little Leaguers are displayed on the 500NT bill(blog entry for 10/06/09).


The Chinese Professional League consists of 4 teams, one of which is the Tainan Uni-President 7-11 Lions that plays at the Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium. Here are some pictures of that stadium, first we have ceremonial arch.

Cute pictures of the Lions mascot.

An endorsement of noodles by a baeball player, you don't see that in the US. But I believe the player in this picture  is Wang Chien-ming who actually pitches for the New York Yankees but is a native of Tainan.

In May of 2008 Taiwan legalized a sports lottery and for the first half of this year the sales reach NT$8 billion or US$247 million and 60% of those sales were for baseball. Some Taiwanese love to gamble.

But in the past month after the Season Final Series, 20 players from the La New Bears and Brother Elephants were arrested for taking bribes from gansters and fixing the games, usually by beating the point spread. Here's a picture of the sport lottery office new my neighborhood. It's been kind of empty since the arrests.

But this isn't the first such scandal.

Last Year the T-Rex team was banned over match fixing by the management and 3 three players.

In 1996 the China Times Eagles were disbanded for match fixing.

There have been 5 times in the past 20 years of the Chinese Professional Baseball League that players have been investigsted for throwing games.

For me, the question is why do people gamble on games that they know could be fixed. Aren't there more favorable odds in just flipping pennies?