He’s on summer break, but 12-year-old Ou Ching (歐晉) has to report to school every day, and he is not there for summer classes.
Ou and 12 other players on the Taoyuan Gueishan Elementary School Baseball Team are training intensively before leaving for the US to compete at the Little League World Series, which starts on Aug. 21 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. The team secured the Asia-Pacific regional qualification berth by scoring five straight wins in the qualifier, defeating South Korea and four other Asia-Pacific teams.
Ou, a left-handed pitcher and hitter, won the Most Valuable Player (MVP) Award in the qualifiers. Teammate Sung Wen-hua and coach Lee Cheng-ta were Best Pitcher and Best Coach.
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMESA
Taiwan has not made it to the championship match of the Little League World Series since 1997.
Lee told the Taipei Times that the team was formed six years ago when he decided to return to Gueishan, his hometown, to be a baseball coach at a local elementary school.
“The school was pretty much like what you see right now,” Lee said, pointing to the concrete school playground. “Players learned how to pitch, catch and hit here. When we wanted to train players to run between bases or slide, we had to go to other schools that had a red-clay field or a grass field.”
STRICT ROUTINE
Players are required to practice every day, including weekends. Most importantly, players must follow a strict code of conduct to stay in the team.
“I am not asking them to be top of the class in grades,” Lee said. “But at the least they must do their homework. And they must be well-behaved and not curse.”
Some of the parents also joined the efforts in training the players as well. Ou’s father balled up newspaper and wrapped them with tape to make improvised baseballs. He would then pitch these to his son in their yard.
“Sometimes, the balls would hit our windows, and we were terrified whenever we heard the ‘bang,’” said Lin Yeh Lai-chuen, Ou’s neighbor. “I had to ask him [Ou] to please hit the ball in the other direction.”
With hard work and a little luck, the previously unknown school team has won several titles, including 2007 and 2008 Care Cup and winning the National Little League Championship last year.
The team’s extraordinary performance prompted the mayor of Gueishan to build a red-clay baseball field in 2007 so that the team could have a proper venue for training.
Among the 12 players chosen for the qualifier this time, six are Aborigines. Sung and four others are of the Amis tribe, while Ou is of the Rukai tribe.
To prepare players, Lee invited high school or junior high pitchers to help with batting practice. By the time the team was ready to compete, these Little League players were able to hit knuckle balls. Lee said that they saw South Korea as the only challenge at the qualifier this time, though in the end Gueishan won 10-3.
At the Little League World Series, Taiwan will have to overcome several tough competitors if they wish to make it to the final, including Mexico, Canada, Japan and Venezuela.
“The focus now is to reinforce batting practice and defense training,” Lee said. “Players must also get used to playing at a grass field and competing at night.”
GOLDEN DRAGON
Taichung’s Golden Dragon Little League Baseball Team won the nation’s first Little League World Series in 1969. Since then, Taiwan has gained a total of 18 World Series titles through different elementary school baseball teams, including three consecutive championships from 1971 to 1973.
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.
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