For Taiwanese sports fans with wider horizons, the Chinese Professional Baseball League acts as a comfort blanket.
Even after disastrous international results in baseball and other codes — Taiwan’s Olympic record in Beijing, especially in baseball, and basketball’s Jones Cup, for example — viewers can tune into the next night’s baseball game on TV or go to the ball park happy in the knowledge that there will be some semblance of competition and spectacle involving local and international players who are, well, professional.
Over the years the league has had to weather its own storms, however, and of these none has been more damaging or more dispiriting than several revelations of match-fixing and the specter of organized crime.
The damage each time has been significant: When the credibility of the competition is in question, crowds shrink and sponsors balk.
With all of this dreadful history hanging over the league’s head, and with global financial turmoil worsening prospects for the league and the professional development of players and administrators, it is no less than astonishing to learn that this season has been utterly blighted by allegations of brazen, top-to-bottom match-fixing involving the dmedia T-Rex club, formerly the Macoto Cobras.
Allegations they remain, but with prosecutors stating that T-Rex executive director Shih Chien-hsin (施建新) has admitted connections with crime figures in manipulating results, the outlook for the club, now suspended, and all its players — crooked or otherwise — is grim.
The damage from this latest Taiwanese sporting debacle will likely be profound.
In order to salvage what credibility the league has left, administrators will have to implement stricter admission criteria, including the tightest possible criminal checks on all players, managers, umpires and other officials.
But even this is unlikely to be enough. With the league such easy prey for organized crime, and with the game by its nature so conducive to fixing, there will have to be a concerted attempt to independently monitor players and officials as the season progresses.
When Prosecutor Wang Cheng-hao (王正皓) said on Thursday that there was little hope for the league, he might have been speaking beyond his station, but he might also have been offering baseball fans a sober prognosis.
One way of starting afresh from this morass would have Taiwan’s better and more reputable teams joining an Asian club competition, as some insiders have suggested.
The problem with this excellent suggestion, however, is that the reputation of Taiwanese baseball may yet sink so low as a result of the T-Rex scandal that an Asian competition may be reluctant to have Taiwanese clubs anywhere near it.
In the meantime, the league’s officials must do rather more than thump their chests and warn of legal action against the T-Rex and its players and officials.
They must instead greatly improve their ability to protect the league from predators and maintain its commercial credibility. The alternative, as the prosecutor suggested, is the death of professional baseball in Taiwan.
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