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Baseball ready to begin again

Baseball fans are heading back to the diamond this year -- some for the first time, others with fond memories of the good old days.

With 300 plus games in store for the new season, two new teams and a unified governing body for the sport, baseball looks to be in good shape.

The merger of the Taiwan Major League and Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) should bring back some of the luster that was lost after the betting scandals of 1996 and the following years of rivalry between the two leagues.

As a mark of the importance which the "national game" is said to hold for the country, the president and over 300 officials will turn up for the first game tomorrow, between the CPBL champion Brother Elephants and what will be its new rival Taipei team, Naluwan Gida.

It should be a fitting start to the season and a new era for local professional baseball.

The CPBL was formed in 1989 and was an immediate success for a baseball-loving public that was used to Little League successes and a good international reputation.

In the early to mid-1990s star player salaries kept on rising as average gates climbed and the big games attracted more than 100,000 fans.

But greed got in the way.

Betting on games was rampant and became so bad that organized crime got involved. Stories of players being pistol whipped and kidnapped for losing a game on which a lot of money was lost made the rounds.

Soon, investigators revealed that there was widespread corruption, from gangsters to pressure tactics in the locker room.

It all ended badly, with the Chinatimes Eagles being ejected from the league when its players were found to have thrown games.

Two of the founding franchises of the CPBL, the Weichuan Dragons and Mercury Tigers then folded for financial reasons, as fans realized the games were not real contests and stopped going to the ballpark.

A rival league was begun in 1996 by Sampo Inc, which lost out on TV rights and for the last six years there has been a battle between the two leagues which put off the punters and caused a further slump in the fortunes of professional baseball.

It was in the interest of everyone to merge the two leagues and when they did so at the end of last year there was relief all round, from government officials to the ordinary fan.

Now, professional baseball in Taiwan has been given another chance to relive its glory days again.
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