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Taiwan eyes Olympic baseball ticket

Taiwan's national baseball team has one last chance to earn a berth in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games baseball tournament, and despite the likely absence of its foreign-based players, the team says it's ready.

It had better be.

The squad drew the wrath of home fans late last year when it finished an embarrassing eighth in the Baseball World Cup in November and a disappointing third in the Asian Baseball Championship in December, and many worried that baseball in Taiwan was in a state of permanent decline.

But the team can redeem itself by finishing in the top three of the final eight-team Olympic qualifying tournament that will be held in Taichung and Douliou, Yunlin County, from March 3 to March 14.

"In fact, this is a five-for-three competition," manager Hung Yi-chung (洪一中) said in Taichung, where the team is training for the tournament.

Hung was referring to the quality of the field, with five countries -- Taiwan, South Korea, Canada, Australia and Mexico -- expected to compete for the final three Olympic slots.

The remaining three teams, international baseball minnows Germany, Spain and South Africa, are seen as having little chance of staging a breakthrough.

South Korea is expected to be the strongest team, Hung said, so Taiwan's game plan will be to win two of its three round-robin games against Australia, Mexico and Canada to secure a top three finish.

Hung's task will be complicated by the absence of Taiwan's foreign-based stars. Pitchers Tsao Chin-hui (曹錦輝) and Keng Po-hsuan (耿伯軒), who play in the US, and Lin En-yu (林恩宇) and Hsu Ming-chieh (許銘傑), who pitch in Japan, have all dropped out and opted to concentrate on advancing their professional careers.

That means Hung will be left with a roster composed mostly of players who compete in Taiwan's Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) or local amateurs, but the manager said he's prepared to play with an all-local 24-man roster if need be.

Major League Baseball has prohibited players on teams' 40-man rosters from participating in the Olympic qualifiers.

Hung hopes to have his team sharp by the time the tournament opens next month. To get the players back into game condition, the national squad will play a six-game warm-up series against the six CPBL teams, beginning on Monday.
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