Visiting night markets in Taipei, one is struck by the number of US major league baseball jerseys for sale.
Over the past decade a number of players from Taiwan have made it to the "big leagues." The first was CHEN Chin-feng 陳 金鋒, an outfielder who played for the Dodgers starting in 2002. Chen is an aborigine, a member of the Siraya group. Another player from Taiwan to join the Dodgers was KUO Hong-chih 郭泓志. Kuo played well enough in 2010 to make it to the all-star game. By far the most successful player from Taiwan thus far, however, is WANG Chien-min 王建民. Wang now pitches for the Washington Nationals, but he anchored the New York Yankees rotation in 2006 and 2007, winning 19 games each season.
You may soon be reading about LIN Tzu-wei 林子偉. Last month Lin signed with the Boston Red Sox for over $2 million. Lin’s 18 and just graduated from high school. The New York Yankees wanted the young shortstop two years ago and offered $350,000. Taiwan’s baseball association blocked the deal, threatening to ban Lin from ever playing or coaching in Taiwan if he signed before graduating from high school.
Much has been written about Japanese baseball (You Gotta Have Wa is a great book) and there’s even a feature film on it (Mr. Baseball, featuring Tom Selleck as the “fish out of water” American playing in Japan). Unfortunately, there’s not much written about the history of baseball in Taiwan.
There are many errors, for example, in the announcer’s opening comments at the 2009 Little League World Series (see YouTube video below). Some are mistakes about Taiwan’s history, but for us here the key one is how baseball came to the island. It was brought to Taiwan by Japanese during the long period (1895-1945) when Taiwan was a Japanese colony (the announcer mistakenly has baseball arriving in Japan after 1945 and then being transmitted to China and finally Taiwan) .
Taiwan, as many teachers know, has enjoyed great success in Little League. Teams from Taiwan has won 17 Little League Championships and a team from Gueishan Elementary School in Taoyuan County has just qualified for the August 2012 World Series in Williamsport, PA.
Taiwan’s government has a useful “100 years of baseball in Taiwan” timeline at: http://www.taiwan.gov.tw/lp.asp?ctNode=1784&CtUnit=516&BaseDSD=7&mp=14. One finds that schools, government departments, and businesses all sponsored teams. At one point during World War II, the top hitter in Japan’s major leagues was WUChang-cheng (1942).
The point of all this is to illustrate how student interest in sports could be exploited to engage them in discussions of Asia, of the intertwining of cultures, and of the business of sports.
For example, what rituals do American players observe before starting a game? You and your students may find this video of how one Taiwanese little league team gets fired up of interest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0C-pC-VMTo
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2009 Little League World Series opening (ESPN via YouTube)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrbPa8HRSpU
With the Olympics again upon us – do your students respond to efforts to use sports to bring up other subjects?
Have students raised questions about "LINsanity" moving away from New York as Jeremy Lin signs with the Houston Rockets. (BTW - Lin is a Californian whose parents are from Taiwan.)
http://online.wsj.com/article/AP86c0073eb3844c83985cffb01068c8ee.html
edited by Clay Dube on 7/20/2012
