Teenage shrieks greeted every star player who turned up for his award yesterday at a festive Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) MVP awards ceremony.
Throngs of young people -- mostly female -- cheered their idols as the CPBL celebrated a successful year which has been capped off by talks of an advantageous merger.
Sung Chao-chee (宋肇基) of the Chinatrust Whales took six awards and NT$460,000. His club will match half of that amount to give the pitcher a total of NT$690,000 for an afternoon's work.
Those impressive numbers were reward for his season statistics, which recorded 16 wins, 183 strikeouts and an ERA of 2.13. He was also the first pitcher in CPBL history to win the Triple Crown.
He edged Jonathan Hurst of the Brother Elephants in the pitching categories on the way to winning the MVP of the Year award.
In a tear-choked speech of lachrymus pauses, Sung thanked the army for giving him leave to attend the awards. It is common for baseball players to return to the army during the offseason in order to complete their national duty.
"I have been waiting three years to win these awards and it's an incredible feeling," Sung said. "I'm just glad the army let me have some leave to come here."
Behind the scenes, two of the four team owners of the CPBL told reporters of their willingness to merge with Taiwan's other professional baseball league, the Taiwan Major League (TML).
They reiterated their stance that paying NT$80 million to the TML in order to dissolve their league, as suggested by the Sports Council -- was a sticking point.
They said a merger had to be fair to both sides and said if not, then the TML would be welcome to join the CPBL.
Presently, it looks as if two teams from the TML, three teams from the CPBL and one other team composed of players from both leagues, will create a new league tentatively called the Taiwan Professional Baseball League.
"This has been a good year for us and the players have performed well on their stage. I believe we are going to raise the level of play even further and look forward to the new season," a CPBL spokesman said.
Taiwan's silver-medal hero at the Asian Games, Chen Chih-yuan (
Strong performances at bat from Chen Chien-wei (陳健偉) and a .334 average gave him the batting him title, while Chen Wen-bin's (陳文賓) record number of 26 home runs in a season brought him the home run king title.
The Brother Elephants' Tsai Feng-an (蔡豐安) won most RBIs, Huang Kan-lin (黃甘霖) got most stolen bases for the fourth consecutive year, while Kuo-lee Chien Fu made the most saves.
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