1990 Professional Baseball Starts in Taiwan

The CPBL, which has given birth to countless stars like Lu Ming-tzu, Huang Ping-yang, Peng Cheng-min and Chen Chin-feng, has just completed its 26th season. Boy, does time fly! To young fans today, team names like the EDA Rhinos, the Chinatrust Brothers and the Lamigo Monkeys are household names, but for many older baseball aficionados, the “golden age” remains the days of the four-team league founded in 1990 by the Wei-Chuan Dragons, the Mercuries Tigers (sponsored by the Mercuries Corporation), the Brother Elephants (sponsored by the Brother Hotel), and the Uni-President Lions.

It was the beginning of a new age for baseball in Taiwan when the CPBL was founded in 1990, and enthusiasm ran high, with attendance averaging nearly 10,000 per game. The intensity of the competition was a subject for daily conversation over tea and at the dinner table. But few people know that when planning for the founding of the league began in 1986, the organizers were constantly worried that at games the players would outnumber the paying spectators! They needn’t have fretted: Not only did the league catch on immediately in Taiwan, Japan’s NHK network even made a special trip to Taiwan to broadcast the first game back to Japan.

Sinorama was right there to report on the thrilling new world of the pro circuit. Two stories in our May 1990 issue—“Play Ball! A New Era for Taiwan Sports” and “Tonson Hung: Pro Baseball’s ‘Midwife’”—brought readers inside the formative period of the league and the atmosphere of fun and excitement that older baseball fans still remember as “the best of times.”