Baseball fans, honest players and the game’s image have been seen as the main casualties of persistent game-fixing in the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) over the past 15 years.
But they aren’t the only ones. Local sportswriters have also been tormented by the continuing scandal, which has led them to question their love for the national pastime, the value of their work and careers in the media, and even their trust and belief in others.
“It’s very difficult to accept that those games you covered were fixed, and those stories you wrote were kind of a joke,” says Lan Tsung-piao, a sportswriter who has been covering baseball since 1991, a year after the CPBL was established.
The game-fixing scandal last year was the sixth in a wave of scandals that has undermined pro baseball in Taiwan since 1996. Similar incidents followed in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008 and last year.
More than 100 Taiwanese and foreign players and coaches have been implicated in those scandals for allegedly taking bribes from local bookies to throw games.
Even big names, such as former US major leaguer Tsao Chin-hui, the first Taiwanese pitcher to make it to the big leagues, have not emerged unscathed, though Tsao was not indicted by prosecutors.
The scandals have sent attendance levels plummeting, with the league never regaining the popularity it experienced in the mid-1990s when it drew an average of more than 5,000 fans per game. In recent years, games have tended to attract between 1,000 and 2,000 people.
Lan said media coverage has also been drastically cut back and reporters are no longer assigned to cover games outside of Taipei.
Former baseball writer Kerry Wu, who quit covering the game in 2000 and now works as a securities analyst, says there would be about 30-40 reporters at each game when the league was at its peak in the 1990s.
Times have changed.
“Now you’re lucky if you can find more than four [reporters] in the press room,” Lan says.
The baseball writer said he did not sense anything wrong until the scandal broke in 1997, when he was shocked to learn that players who were his close friends had been lying to him over the years.
“I still love baseball. I really do, but I’m having trouble figuring out who — including players and coaches — to believe,” he says.
Lan still remembers the good times, making the repeated scandals even harder to fathom.
He recalls seeing a family of four, days before the 1996 scandal broke out, happily talking about the game in the parking lot of a ballpark with the father explaining baseball rules to his children.
“It was such a lovely and inspiring scene. And that’s why I never imagined how deeply those players and scandals would hurt the feelings of these passionate and supporting fans in every corner of the country,” he says.
Some sportswriters were suspicious of the integrity of the game from the beginning and published their observations, Lan says, but it was very difficult to tell who was throwing games and who was not.
“We could not pretend it was not happening. We had to depend on our instincts but we had no evidence. Some writers, me included, received letters from law firms threatening legal action. Some were even sued,” he said.
The scandals and declining interest in the game was difficult for these writers to take, Lan’s wife said.
“You’re talking about a group of guys who covered the game, went home to watch the replay and played nothing but baseball video games together when they were on road trips,” she says. “Most of them are baseball junkies who are hopelessly passionate about the game to a pathetic degree.”
A writer who helped a player write his autobiography before he was implicated in game-fixing allegations said she “felt cheated after the scandal broke out.”
Wu says he turned his attention to the US Major League baseball after quitting his job as a reporter and has not been following the domestic league lately. Others have decided to cover amateur competitions.
Lan thinks the league should suspend operations for a year or two, change its name, and start again because the fans have endured too many scandals.
Kevin Hsiao, a younger reporter who has been covering the game for only a few years, feels differently.
“For younger reporters like me, we grew up with this league. It’s hard to imagine that this league would vanish for even one day,” he says.
Lan acknowledges that Hsiao will probably get his way.
“The show will go on. All we can do is cover the game as well and as responsibly as we can. Hopefully there will be no more scandals. Just don’t bet on it,” he said.
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