With the Yankees' stunning elimination from the Major League Baseball playoffs on Saturday, Taiwan -- with its native son and Yankees starting pitcher Wang Chien-ming's (
Or does it?
Taiwan's Public Television Service (PTS) announced yesterday that its eight-volume documentary on the history of baseball here would go on sale today. Although its release comes at a bad time for the nation's most celebrated baseball player, the series is a fitting tribute to a century of baseball in Taiwan.
This year marks the sport's 100th year here. It was introduced to the country by Japan during the colonial period, PTS general manager Hu Yuan-hui (胡元輝) said.
The television network held a press conference in Taipei yesterday to announce the release of the documentary and screen a segment before an audience of domestic baseball officials and Seattle Mariners minor league shortstop Chen Yun-chi (
Although the screened segment focused on Wang, Hu said that the full documentary was about "how Wang came to be," a reference to the generations of legendary baseball players that preceded Wang and established a tradition of baseball on the island.
"This documentary is about Taiwan," filmmaker Hsieh Shih-yuan (
"When I first heard an ESPN announcer refer to Wang [Chien-ming] as a Taiwanese, I felt so proud," Chen told reporters yesterday, adding that Wang has been "Taiwan's cultural ambassador to the world."
The minor league prospect himself is rising fast through the Seattle Mariners' farm system and hopes to join his compatriot in the big leagues soon.
"I've got some pretty big shoes to fill," Chen said.
Wayne Lee, secretary general of the Chinese Professional Baseball League, praised the documentary at the conference yesterday for showing how scores of Taiwanese talent have entered Japanese and US professional baseball leagues since the 1980s.
"Wang Chien-ming is part of a trend of exporting baseball talent," Lee said, adding that Taiwanese players were getting better with each generation and that the tradition of baseball was well-entrenched in the social fabric of the nation.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching