The Chinese Taipei Baseball Association (CTBA), Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) and Sports Administration yesterday signed a cooperation agreement they said would help Taiwan qualify for next year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics, after a conflict between the organizations was blamed for the nation’s loss in a tournament.
Taiwan is to host the World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) Premier 12 tournament in November due to the joint efforts of the CTBA and the confederation, so the association would be in charge of hosting the championship and with the full support of the CPBL, the agreement said.
It stipulates that the league is in charge of forming and training the national baseball team for the tournament, but is to select its training committee with representatives from the CTBA and the administration.
The committee would still be subject to the league’s guidance and planning, it says.
The CPBL is to lead the formation of a national team and train players for all top-tier international competitions, including the World Baseball Classic, Premier 12 and Olympics, the agreement says.
The league is also responsible for analyzing other countries’ players at the competitions, as well as Taiwanese players’ insurance and medical treatments, it says, adding that the CPBL can register and use its logo in accordance with the WBSC rules for national teams.
The national team’s coach is to be selected by the committee and submitted to the administration for approval, the agreement says.
However, the CTBA is to host top-tier competitions and train players for non-top tier games, it says.
Following criticism that the association had made too many concessions, CTBA chairman Jeffrey Koo Jr (辜仲諒) said that he disagreed.
Taiwan would make a great leap forward because of the agreement, he said.
“It is all worth it if we manage to build the strongest national team,” Koo said. “We have to qualify for the Olympics, whatever it takes. We must beat South Korea — that is my biggest dream.”
The national team coach is to be chosen from among the league’s four teams and confirmed by mid-April, CPBL Chairman John Wu (吳志揚) said, adding that winning the Premier 12 championship would be a crucial step toward qualifying for the Olympics.
As part of training, the league would up the ante by having the national team’s players compete against star players at the CPBL All-Star Game this year, Wu said.
A conflict between the CPBL and CTBA over the national team’s formation was widely blamed for Taiwan’s loss in the first round of the 2017 World Baseball Classic.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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