Chinese Taipei lost to Mainland China twice in a row in major tournaments. It seems totally disgraceful to the “pathetic” fans that the co-called “National Pride”(國球) lost to a populous nation in which almost no one is really interested in baseball games except several dedicated teams. The vaunted, ill-founded “National Pride” has long been Taiwan’s only stronger item of sports to compete with Mainland China internationally, but now the last resort is shattered. Yes, here is the key word, “internationally”, which has become such an unbearable pill for Taiwan to swallow.

Baseball games, especially professional ones, are supposed to develop and flourish in a vast and wealthy country like the U.S., or in a country with sound transport infrastructure like Japan, but not in Taiwan. Do you think people would spend TWD1000, going to a mediocre stadium, watching an AA-level game, which is occasionally a fake one? Don’t be silly. Incidentally, the baseball market of Taiwan is not big enough to financially support adequate numbers of teams to accommodate limited fans. People would lose their enthusiasm by degrees watching those “old faces” play among themselves everyday. So how the players would survive? Inevitably, they would probably be allured by the gambling-gangsters to ask them be struck out or lose a ground ball intentionally so as to throw a match. No wonder the fake-game cases would occur from time to time.

Baseball culture in Taiwan is one of the vestiges of the Japanese colony. Coaches and players are using weird Japanese-accented terms to communicate with each other; fans are using Japanese styles to root for their teams, politicians are even trying to enshrine “國球” into the Constitution. All of them would scarcely think of how to surpass Japan in baseball someday. They might only care about how the baseball has made Taiwan different from the Mainland. You disdain Japan, right? Perversely, we like Japanese sports instead, so what?

That sucks.