Taiwanese baseball superstar Chen Wei-yin (陳偉殷) retired yesterday. During his career, the pitcher had sustained a number of injuries in the left shoulder supraspinatus tendon, biceps tendon, subscapularis tendon, anterior interior articular capsule, humerus to shoulder joint ligaments and other parts. In July 2022, just a few days after his 37th birthday, he went into the operating room.
Neal ElAttrache, the attending surgeon, is an authority in this field, and has operated on almost every major baseball player, including Japanese baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani. Inserting an arthroscope into Chen’s posterior shoulder joint, he discovered that the situation was much more serious than he had anticipated.
An MRI was performed prior to the surgery, but the locations and seriousness of soft tissue or ligament injuries could only be more closely confirmed through the arthroscope. ElAttrache spent the next few hours recreating the shoulder with surgical materials augmenting what was left that was usable.
It is very difficult for professional athletes to recover from shoulder injuries. Chen knew this before he decided to undergo surgery. During his last few months with Japanese Hanshin Tigers, he woke up every day with pain in his shoulder. However, the pain was not the reason for the operation; it was his determination to be able to pitch again.
“Even if there is only a 10 percent chance, I still want to try it. Even if it is a failure, it may be a useful reference for future players in the same situation,” Chen said.
A long recovery period followed the surgery. At first, Chen was unable to even lift his hand. A few months later, he was able to throw and catch balls, but with the speed of a Little League player. After shuttling between sports agent Scott Boras’ training base in California and his private training facility in Seattle day after day for more than a year, he finally found a way to live with his new shoulder.
Last season, between offers from South and Central America, and the Independent Baseball Leagues (IBL), Chen chose to join the IBL’s Long Island Ducks in New York, hoping to get back his feeling for the game. In May last year, he threw faster than he had done during his Hanshin Tigers days. With his four-seam straight balls that defied gravity, the feeling of allowing hitters to hit only the lower edge of the ball had returned.
Still, every era comes to an end, and despite offers from the Asia Winter Baseball League, Chen decided to save the last games of his baseball career for Taiwan. After he left the Long Island Ducks, he scheduled a series of the platelet-rich plasma therapy, timing his injections in advance, so that if his country needed him at last year’s World Baseball Softball Confederation Premier12 championships or the World Baseball Classic qualifiers last month, he could reboot himself and take on the challenge for one last time. In the end, it was not to be.
I often think of the words from veteran baseball coach Dave Wallace a few years ago: “I was lucky to have met the best pitchers from three Asian countries during my career: Nomo Hideo from Japan, Park Chan-ho from South Korea, and Chen Wei-yin from Taiwan.”
As baseball fans, we are honored to have been able to witness this generation of greats.
I would never forget Chen’s smooth and glorious pitching, and efforts to chase new dreams during his 20-year career. Over the years, when he was busy with games or simply needed a ghostwriter, sportswriters would help him express himself. This time, every sentence of his retirement statement was written by him and his wife.
“Thank you, baseball, for giving a country boy from Kaohsiung, Taiwan, the chance to stand on the world stage and realize his dream,” Chen wrote. “Goodbye, my pitcher’s mound.”
Farewell to the Chen Wei-yin era.
Hans Fan is chief data scientist of MidMetrics.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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