Merging the two former professional baseball leagues earlier this year helped revive the game after years of public apathy -- but the specter of corruption is clearly still hovering.
News of threatening letters to three Makoto Gida players -- following their team's series sweep against the Brother Elephants last month -- has revived talk of the bad old days in the mid- to late-1990s when corruption and gang- land activity in baseball nearly destroyed the game.
Though it was suspected underworld figures may have been responsible for the letters to the three players -- star hitter Hsieh Jia-hsian (
All three letters were said to be from a single source and warned the players to be careful, "or face the consequences" if they continued to perform well.
"We are always very concerned whenever something like this takes place," CPBL Secretary General Lee Wen-pin (
"We wish Gida had reported the incident to the league sooner than it did, so that we could take more aggressive countermeasures."
Earlier this week, in the first meeting between the two teams since then, the league beefed up security at the grounds they were playing and requested several undercover police officers to mix with the crowd.
CPBL founder and Brother Elephants owner Hung Rei-ho (
"Whoever you are, please leave the way clear for the development of professional baseball in Taiwan. We really can't afford another blow to this great game," Hung said.
CPBL club owners will address the threatening letter issue on Monday.
Round Up
The league's top two teams did what they were expected to do last week against weaker opponents and swept their series.
In a four-game affair between the league leading President Lions and the weaker First Securities Agan in Kaohsiung, the Lions took advantage of a poor pitching performance from Agan and won all four contests.
Rookie pitcher Pan Wei-luen (
Pan held the Agan to two runs over five innings of play en route to a 8-6 victory.
Pan's fellow teammate Joe Davenport, a five-game winner in the league, also recorded a win for his team against the Agan in the same series.
Davenport pitched seven strong innings, while yielding three runs[only one earned] on six hits.
The three-game series between the Sinon Bulls and Makoto Gida in Hsinchuang and Hsinchu also resulted in a series sweep by the stronger Bulls.
Led by their foreign starters, Osvaldo Martinez and Jeff Andra, plus local ace Tsai Chung-nan, the Bulls took all three games by an overwhelming combined score of 31-to-9.
Offensively for the Bulls, the series belonged to left fielder Lou Soong-yeon (羅松永), whose 9-for-11 performance with five RBI's turned many previous doubters of his hitting ability into loyal believers.
The Brother Elephants were one-against-three in their four-game series against the ChinaTrust Whales in Hsinchu and Tienmu.
RSS