After six years of ups and downs, Gu Lin Ruei-yang on Monday capped one of the best seasons imaginable in the CPBL by becoming the first Taiwanese pitcher to win the Most Valuable Player (MVP) award in nearly two decades.
The Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions’ flamethrowing right-hander is the first Taiwanese pitcher to win the CPBL regular season MVP award since Lin En-yu of the Macoto Cobras in 2006.
From 2007 to last year, pitchers have won the MVP four times, but they have all been foreign nationals.
Photo: CNA
Gu Lin had a remarkable season by any metric, posting a league-best 1.66 ERA and 10 wins, while pitching 125 innings over 21 games, all career bests. He was also the only Taiwanese pitcher to record double-digit wins this season.
That performance earned him 157 of 210 points in the MVP voting, beating out home-run leader Steven Moya Mercedes of the TSG Hawks and win leader Mario Sanchez of the Lions, by 79 and 94 points respectively.
In addition to the MVP title, the 24-year-old also won for best ERA and took home the “Best Nine” award for being named as pitcher on the CPBL all-pro team.
Gu Lin credited his success to Lions manager Lin Yueh-ping, whom he referred to as “my second dad.”
That sentiment mirrored Lin Yueh-ping’s comments in late September, when he said Gu Lin was “just like my son” while discussing the pitcher’s breakout season and his potential to play overseas in next year.
In 2018, when Gu Lin joined the team as the second overall pick in the league’s mid-season draft, his father and grandfather passed away, he said, adding that Lin Yueh-ping, then the team’s pitching coach, helped guide him through that difficult time.
“I was inconsistent, and I lost faith in myself, but I believe manager Ping faced a lot of doubts when he put me in this position. I never confronted those doubts because he bore them for me,” Gu Lin said tearfully at the awards ceremony in Taipei.
“Now that I’ve won this award, I hope manager Ping, and my dad and my grandfather up there can be proud of me,” he said, pledging to continue to grow.
Gu Lin has battled health issues since joining the Lions. After 20 starts in 2021 in his first full season in the CPBL, he only started 12 and 13 times in the following two years, although his ERA improved significantly from 3.34 to 1.80 last year.
He was expected to lead the Lions in the Taiwan Series last month, but was pulled from the mound after three scoreless innings in Game 1 due to back tightness and never returned in a series, which the Lions lost to the CTBC Brothers in five games.
The injury also forced him to withdraw from the national team ahead of the upcoming World Baseball Softball Confederation Premier12 tournament.
Despite those setbacks, Gu Lin is expected to sign with an overseas team in the offseason, with Japan’s Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) reportedly looking at the pitcher.
On Friday last week, the CPBL announced that the Lions had approved Gu Lin’s free agency request to play abroad.
If Gu Lin joins the NPB, he would be the first Taiwanese player since Wang Po-jung in 2019 to move to the NPB from the CPBL and the first Taiwanese pitcher to do so since Lin En-yu in 2007.
All of the Taiwanese players currently in the NPB or the minor league teams of NPB franchises joined directly from local high schools or universities.
Gu Lin said he hopes his story proves that playing overseas is not the only option for talented high-school players.
“Pitchers from the CPBL can also compete against foreign pitchers,” he said.
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