Attendance at professional baseball games has declined nearly 30 percent since former Major League Baseball slugger Manny Ramirez left Taiwan on June 21, local media reported.
The EDA Rhinos, with which Ramirez played for three stellar months earlier this year, has seen the biggest drop in attendance, local media reports said, adding that the Rhinos’ home game attendance averaged more than 9,000 in the first three months of this season, but has declined by 46 percent to just more than 4,000 since Ramirez’s departure.
The three other teams in the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) have also been affected by the end of the “Manny craze,” recording a 20 percent to 40 percent decrease in average attendance, according to the report.
The falling attendance has also taken a toll on TV ratings, with nearly all sports channels seeing their ratings plunge by 50 percent.
Managers of all four CPBL teams have recently said that they are planning various promotional strategies to boost game attendance.
“We will draw more baseball fans into the stadiums with remarkable games, as well as a wide variety of interesting activities,” a club manager said.
On Friday last week, a total of 4,464 people attended the 148th game of the season, between Brother Elephants and the Lamigo Monkeys, breaking the 1 million mark for overall attendance this season. It was the fastest rise to that mark in the league’s 24-year history.
The previous record was set in 1992, the CPBL’s third year, when attendance broke the 1 million mark in the season’s 151st game.
The image of the sport in Taiwan was tarnished by a series of gambling and game-fixing scandals that emerged in 1997.
The league nearly collapsed last year after the Sinon Bulls pulled out, but E-United Group bought the Bulls and renamed them the EDA Rhinos.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
If China chose to invade Taiwan tomorrow, it would only have to sever three undersea fiber-optic cable clusters to cause a data blackout, Jason Hsu (許毓仁), a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator, told a US security panel yesterday. In a Taiwan contingency, cable disruption would be one of the earliest preinvasion actions and the signal that escalation had begun, he said, adding that Taiwan’s current cable repair capabilities are insufficient. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) yesterday held a hearing on US-China Competition Under the Sea, with Hsu speaking on
Taiwan is awaiting official notification from the US regarding the status of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) after the US Supreme Court ruled US President Donald Trump's global tariffs unconstitutional. Speaking to reporters before a legislative hearing today, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said that Taiwan's negotiation team remains focused on ensuring that the bilateral trade deal remains intact despite the legal challenge to Trump's tariff policy. "The US has pledged to notify its trade partners once the subsequent administrative and legal processes are finalized, and that certainly includes Taiwan," Cho said when asked about opposition parties’ doubts that the ART was
The US’ joint strikes with Israel on Iran dismantled a key pillar of China’s regional strategy, removing an important piece in Beijing’s potential Taiwan Strait scenario, said Zineb Riboua, a senior researcher at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Middle East Peace and Security. In an article titled: “The Iran Question Is All About China,” Riboua said that understanding the Iran issue in the context of China’s “grand strategy” is essential to fully grasp the complexity of the situation. Beijing has spent billions of dollars over the years turning Iran into a “structural strategic asset,” diverting US military resources in the
RSS