CPBL | A New Ballpark for the League's Worst Year (Xinzhuang Baseball Stadium)

The first baseball ever played at 新莊棒球場 was game two of the 1997 Taiwan Series, on 19 October, and the team on the field was barely a team. 味全龍 played 時報鷹 — the 二代鷹, the borrowed side assembled from other clubs' reserves after prosecutors took most of the Eagles' roster that summer. All 7,500 seats were full, which was the ballpark's entire capacity at the time. A new ground opened for the worst season the league had ever had. Taipei County had built it as its first professional-grade ballpark, the eighth in the country. It grew in stages: outfield seating in October 2003 took it to 10,000 and brought one of Taiwan's first big screens; an upper infield deck in 2005 pushed it past 12,000, though that deck was built so far forward and so low that it blocked the view from behind, a complaint fans have never stopped making. The first regular-season game came on 28 February 1998. 兄弟象 used it for years. So did the rival Taiwan Major League. It hosted the 2013 World Baseball Classic qualifiers and the 2017 Universiade. In 2017 富邦 won a ten-year concession from the city, running to the end of 2027, and moved 富邦悍將 in — the first club to make this ground a proper home. They scheduled all sixty home games here from 2018, put over a hundred million New Taiwan dollars into the building, and became briefly famous among Taiwanese fans for having the best toilets in professional baseball. It is at 和興街66號, a ten-minute walk from 新莊 station on the Orange Line, or one stop on the free shuttle from 新埔 on game days. 📸 Cover: Photo by 象心力, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons — the ballpark in 2011, before the Fubon refit.