Taiwan national baseball team manager Tseng Hao-jiu on Tuesday announced the updated roster for next month’s 2026 World Baseball Classic (WBC) qualifiers at the Taipei Dome.
The team previously confirmed that Chen Chieh-hsien, captain of Taiwan’s World Baseball Softball Confederation Premier12 championship team last year, would be returning.
On Tuesday, Tseng said that after a management meeting, they made minor adjustments to the roster.
Photo: CNA
Of the 19 pitchers on the list, 10 are based in Taiwan, while nine play abroad, he said, adding that the roster includes seven infielders and four outfielders, some of whom also play overseas.
Tseng also added another catcher, bringing the total number of catchers to four.
The roster is still subject to change, depending on the response from players and coaches, and the willingness of overseas teams to release players, he said.
The manager added that training for the qualifiers would start on Feb. 3 and that overseas players would gradually return to Taiwan to join practices.
Before the qualifiers, the national team would hold six or seven exhibition games, two of which would be open to the public, Tseng said.
Qualifiers for the 2026 World Baseball Classic start on Feb. 21 at the Taipei Dome with Pool A teams South Africa playing Nicaragua in the afternoon followed by Taiwan versus Spain in the evening. After six games in a round-robin format, the first-placed team would advance to the World Baseball Classic, while the second and third-placed teams would vie for a spot in a seventh game, to be held on Feb. 25.
In Tucson, Arizona, Pool B teams start their games on March 2, with China playing Germany and Brazil playing Colombia, with the final game to be held on March 6.
The group stage of the World Baseball Classic runs from March 6 to 11, with four pools of five teams each, including the yet-to-be-decided qualifiers.
Pool A (Puerto Rico, Cuba, Canada and Panama) are to play in San Juan, Puerto Rico, while Houston, Texas, would host Pool B (the US, Mexico, Italy and the UK).
Pool C (Japan, Australia, South Korea and the Czech Republic) are to play in Tokyo, and Pool D (Venezuela, Dominican Republic, the Netherlands and Israel) start in Miami, Florida.
When Paddy Dwyer arrived in China in 1976, crowds jostled to catch a glimpse of him and his companions — the first Western soccer team to play in the country. China was emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and on the brink of market reforms that would take the country from economic stagnation to explosive growth. “All we could see was lines of people running beside our bus, trying to look in the windows, to see their first visual of a white person,” he said. “It was all bicycles,” he said. “There were very few cars to be seen.” Dwyer,
Jannik Sinner continued his quest to become the first man in history to win five Masters 1000 tournaments in a row with a 6-2, 6-3 victory over Danish qualifier Elmer Moller at the Madrid Open on Sunday. The world leader extended his winning streak to 19 matches, a run that began early March in Indian Wells, and he has captured 24 consecutive victories at the Masters 1000 level, dating back to the Paris Masters last October. Searching for a maiden title at this level on clay, Sinner advanced to the round of 16 at the Caja Magica with a 77-minute performance against
Some of Clearlake Capital Group’s largest investors are growing increasingly concerned about how much time the company’s co-founders are spending on sports investments as they have struggled to complete the fundraising for the private equity firm’s latest flagship fund. One of Clearlake’s co-founders, Behdad Eghbali, has been spending what some investors described as a disproportionate amount of time on the firm’s investment in Chelsea Football Club in recent months. Now, co-founder Jose E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones, are nearing a record US$3.9 billion deal to acquire the San Diego Padres. That personal investment by Feliciano has set off the latest
A new NZ$683 million (US$404 million) stadium that was a symbol of Christchurch’s struggle to rebuild after a deadly earthquake struck the New Zealand city is to host its first match tomorrow in front of a sellout crowd. A magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed 185 people in February 2011 and toppled or damaged buildings, including the city’s old Lancaster Park. The stadium, which hosted international rugby and cricket, and was home to the Canterbury Crusaders, was badly damaged and never reopened. It was bulldozed in 2019 and turned into sports fields, leaving the Crusaders without a permanent home. Government funding for a new stadium was
RSS