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When Su Chih-chieh, a rising star on the Taiwanese baseball team Uni Lions, received a spectacular sliding catch against Brothers on Thursday, his feat was met with almost complete silence.
The stands at the 12,000-seat stadium may have been empty, but the smiling 25-year-old outfielder had a much larger audience elsewhere: More than 580,000 people abroad watched an English broadcast of the match.
Suspension of this year’s Major League Baseball season in the US Forced by the coronavirus pandemic, the United States left Taiwan, which contained the outbreak early and avoided blocks, the only country that still plays professional baseball.
The longing for diehard fans in the west for their beloved game has catapulted the Uni Lions and the other three teams from Taiwan’s Professional Baseball League of China (CPBL) to the international spotlight.
Blockades in the United States and Europe have disrupted the world of sports. With the football leagues closed in Western Europe, the Belarusian First Division is attracting viewers who typically follow Real Madrid or Manchester United.
But in Taiwan, the unexpected care has had an emotional and political impact. Here, “baseball is a vehicle for national identity and pride in a very unusual way,” said Andrew Morris, a professor at California State Polytechnic University who wrote a book on the history of baseball in the country. “It marks them as being different from China.”
Beijing claims Taiwan as its territory and threatens to invade if Taipei resists unification indefinitely, permanently covering this prosperous 24m country. But Taiwan has earned international praise for its success in containing the coronavirus. There have only been 429 confirmed cases and six deaths.
Now, the sudden interest in Taiwanese baseball has created another opportunity to build soft power and ease its isolation imposed by China.
Eleven Sports, a global sports television company, began broadcasting in English when the CPBL season began last month. The 11 games he broadcast on Twitter have been viewed more than 8.6 million times, despite viewers on the US east coast. USA They have to get up at 6.30 a.m. to look at, and those further west in the middle of the night.
In Taiwan, that brings back fond memories of baseball in tough times half a century ago. Between 1969 and 1996, Taiwanese teams won the Little League World Series 17 times. To see their boys play in Pennsylvania, the Taiwanese also had to get up in the early hours.
“There was only one small black-and-white television in the neighborhood, at the corner store. We all got up at 2 in the morning and went in there, “said Jason Chang, 58, of Taipei, recalling Little League games in the early 1970s.” The image was blurry and the signal was often cut, but we are very proud. “
The longest winning stretch of Taiwan’s Little League was in the 1970s, just as it lost its international recognition to Beijing. In 1971 Taipei was expelled from the UN and in 1979 the United States changed its diplomatic ties with China.
“Baseball was what saved us,” recalled Mr. Chang. “It was very relaxing. The countries were abandoning us one after another and we felt alone, but there were our children in the United States, for all to see. ”
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Baseball helped define national identity in Taiwan long before that era. The game was brought to Taiwan by Japan, who ruled the island between 1895 and 1945. According to Professor Morris, Japan introduced the sport to Taiwanese in the 1920s in an effort to make its brand of colonialism more inclusive.
Following Japan’s defeat in World War II, Kuomintang, the then ruling party of China, took over Taiwan. He used baseball as a symbol of the strength and health of the Chinese nation and continued to spread that theme even after the continent lost to the Communist Party.
The now ruling Progressive Democratic Party has again claimed baseball as a symbol of a Taiwanese nation and is trying to tap into the international interest in baseball in Taiwan.
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“Hello friends from all over the world! Thank you for staying up late or getting up early to cheer us on for the first hit with us in Taiwan, ”President Tsai Ing-wen wrote on Twitter last month.
He tweeted ESPN host Keith Olbermann, asking him to watch the game, and greeted him as a former student at Cornell University.
Olbermann has given Taiwan baseball a boost. “Nothing has made me wake up even a little happy in the morning since I worked a day shift on CNN in 1981-84,” he tweeted. “I’m getting up for this.”
