The Kengyuan Cup has returned after an absence of 32 years.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chen Ying (陳瑩), the granddaughter of the late baseball star Chen Keng-yuan (陳耕元), after whom the event was named, said that the cup began in 1985 as an event for baseball enthusiasts to meet each other.
Chen Keng-yuan’s talent for baseball was discovered by a Japanese teacher during his studies at a public school in Taitung and he was transferred to the Chiayi Agricultural and Forestry School, the predecessor of the modern-day University of Chiayi, Chen Ying said.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Chen Keng-yuan was a shortstop in the school’s baseball team, which came second in the Japanese national high school baseball championship at the Koshien Stadium near Kobe, Japan, she said.
The team later became the subject of the movie Kano — the nickname for Chiayi Agricultural and Forestry School in Japanese — produced by Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖).
Chen Keng-yuan later became a teacher and doubled as the school’s baseball coach, eventually becoming the nation’s first Aboriginal dean at Taitung Vocational School, she said.
Chen Ying, who held a press conference in Taipei on Tuesday with Wei and retired baseball players Chen Yi-hsin (陳義信) and Wang Kuang-hui (王光輝), said that the event would begin today and run through Sunday at the two baseball stadiums in Taitung County.
She said local teams in Taitung, as well as other teams from across the nation, had been invited to attend the event.
Wei said that Taiwanese baseball does not just need good players; it also needs to slowly foster an audience.
He added that he hoped Taiwanese baseball could garner as much support as the game does in the US and Japan.
Such support would give an incentive for the players to improve and allow the clubs to offer better financial incentives, Wei said.
He said he hoped the competition would give rise to more baseball teams, which in turn would generate a larger audience.
Seeing a packed stadium would give players a real sense of honor, Wei said.
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:
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