Yet underlying all of Yu's frank criticism and scandal exposure is an intense love of the game. He freely describes how the Taiwanese little league teams that dominated the LLB championship competition in the 1970s were actually national all-star teams - in violation of LLB rules - and how Taiwanese authorities deliberately deceived LLB officials sent to investigate. But Yu seems uninterested in Taiwan's international baseball prestige. Rather, the real lamentable consequence for him is the impact of the LLB championships on grass-roots baseball, and the change in attitude that the titles encouraged. He says that the success of these teams "brought distortion and ugliness to schools that focused solely on turning out championship players and teams" and that "Taiwan paid a large price for its LLB membership in terms of attitude toward, values of, and development of the island's baseball."
The book is certainly most suited to baseball fans. Yu at times provides more information than casual English readers care to know, and readers without some background will find names of players going by in a blur. However, for anyone interested in Taiwanese politics, Yu has interesting perspectives on how the government used LLB as a tool in its "second-track diplomacy" against international isolation. Or, readers might be interested to learn how grassroots baseball played an important role in preserving Holko language when the KMT instituted its Mandarin-only policy.
As Yu is quick to point out, baseball's history in Taiwan has been blemished with scandal at all levels of the game. Yet for Yu, the scandals and cheating incidents are not an inherent flaw in Taiwan's version of the sport. Rather, they all have their origins in factors that can be traced and identified. Much of the problem, in Yu's view, is that since Taiwan first achieved international success with the LLB, Taiwanese have viewed baseball as a means to an end: championships and international recognition. He believes that if people played the game for fun as it is intended, many of those problems would go away.
With Taiwan's baseball community today still more focused on international superstars than home-grown leagues, Yu's version of baseball's development seems all the more relevant.
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