Taiwan's Wang makes it into `Time' top 100

Taiwanese baseball player and New York Yankees pitcher Wang Chien-ming (王建民) has been named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people for this year.

Wang, 27, is the only Taiwanese on this year's list, and the third, after President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and film director Ang Lee (李安), to be included in the top 100 since the magazine began running the series in 2004. Wang is also the only baseball player on this year's list.

Wang said through his agent that he was honored to receive the award, and that he would work even harder to live up to people's high expectations of him.

Author Bette Bao Lord, the Shanghai-born wife of former US ambassador to China Winston Lord, wrote the introduction for Wang on the magazine's Web site, comparing him to the first black American to play in the Major Leagues, Jackie Robinson.

She said that Wang, like Robinson, is "chipping away the culture barrier."

Lord, who immigrated to the US from Shanghai in 1946 when she was eight years old, chronicled her own struggles to adapt to US culture and her adoration of Robinson in her book In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson.

Lord described Wang as "one of my tribe."

"In his island home, he is already a supernova. Whenever he pitches, whether it's a live telecast or a rerun, Taiwan ditches its political woes and personal cares to huddle in the most unlikely places -- from bars to beauty parlors to boardrooms -- to cheer Chien-ming," she wrote.

"No matter that the fan shouting alongside is [a] mandarin or mendicant, from the mainland or local born, a great-great-grandma with bound feet or a bare-bottomed tot, the voices are one," Lord wrote.

The 100 people on Time's list are divided into five categories -- leaders and revolutionaries; artists and entertainers; heroes and pioneers; scientists and thinkers; and builders and titans. Wang is listed as No. 57 under "heroes and pioneers."

Editors at the magazine said that more than 100 candidates had been nominated for the category, but only 19 were chosen in the end.

Time began accepting recommendations for more than 1,000 candidates at the end of last year. It made its decisions after holding an online vote and soliciting the opinions of correspondents from around the world.

The magazine will publish the cover story, The People Who Shape Our World, in its May 11 issue.

During the 2006 season Wang won 19 games for the Yankees, the highest win total in baseball.

He finished second in Cy Young Award balloting, despite making one of the lowest salaries in baseball.