"It's taken me awhile to adjust to such a different life, but what can I do? Life must go on," he said.
Jen added that although he misses playing terribly, he is not keen about returning to the major leagues.
"There's no point in going back if those old coaches are still there manipulating the selection of players," he said.
To keep baseball fans interested in the sport, Jen said that the government should not be content with simply holding one world cup championship.
"In addition to making an effort to hold more international baseball events, government agencies should build more baseball stadiums that meet international standards; discover and cultivate more baseball talent; and raise the quality of coaching," he said.
What is equally important is to encourage corporate sectors to support baseball teams, he added.
"Incentives such as tax reduction might not be a bad idea," he said.
`Disunity doesn't lead anywhere'
Unlike Jen and Wang, Hsieh Ming-yung (
Hsieh, 54, was one of the players representing Taiwan in the 1972 Baseball World Cup in Nicaragua. It marked the first time Taiwan ever played in the Baseball World Cup. Hsieh later led Taiwan to the Olympic silver as head coach of the nation's team in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona.
Sitting in his fourth-floor apartment in Hsintien City in Taipei County, Hsieh said that he has seen dramatic changes in baseball over the years.
"I remember playing baseball in junior high -- we were so poor that we had to hand-sew broken baseballs and use tape and nails to fix broken bats," he said.
He added that when the public first began to take notice of baseball in the 1960s and 1970s, the only place where a game could be played properly was the then New Park, where the 228 Memorial Park now stands.
Just as the game began to really take off with the introduction of a pro league in 1989, a gambling scandal and then the creation of the baseball association and the major league prompted fans to turn their backs on the sport.
The Chinese-Taipei Baseball Association (
Many baseball observers attribute a decrease in the quality of play to the establishment of the second league as the creation of many more teams made it significantly easier to go pro.
A lowering in the quality of the games turned some fans off. When the betting scandal later broke, it was a near-fatal blow to an already struggling sport.
"To win back baseball fans, the two organizations must work together and the two leagues must integrate," Hsieh said. "Disunity doesn't lead anywhere."
Hsieh added that he was also upset about the political disputes over the venue for the world cup's opening and closing ceremonies.
Taipei and Kaohsiung cities engaged in a political tug of war when Kaohsiung City tried to change the venue of the award and closing ceremony from Taipei to Kaohsiung.
The dispute, however, was finally resolved when the International Baseball Federation rejected Kaohsiung's proposal.
RSS