In the book One Hundred Years of Baseball in Taiwan (台灣棒球一百年), baseball historian Hsieh Shih-yuan (謝仕淵) described the excitement the public felt when they listened to Golden Dragon’s victory through a live radio broadcast: “When the last hitter was called out, the attentive listeners huddling around the radio went wild. You then heard firecrackers going off in the distance, one place after another, shattering the midnight silence.”
The Golden Dragon players also received a hero’s welcome when they returned, with about 500,000 people either waiting for them at the airport or attending a parade in their honor in Taipei City.
On the country’s prospects, Hsieh said that the nation had invested a lot of emotion in the Little League World Series.
“We have such a high expectation for it because of these past glories as well as the image we generally associate with them, and that expectation has pretty much shaped the nation’s baseball in the past 40 years,” Hsieh said.
RSS