CPBL | Seventeen Innings, Then the Raid (Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium)

Game six of the 2009 Taiwan Series ran for six hours and fourteen minutes at 台南市立棒球場 and finished at seventeen minutes past eleven at night. Seventeen innings — still the longest game in CPBL history by both measures. 兄弟象 were facing elimination, 統一獅 needed one win to defend the title, and the two of them could not settle it. In the top of the seventeenth 王勝偉 hit a solo home run, and the Elephants won 5:4 to force a game seven.

They lost that one 2:5. It was the second year running they had reached the Taiwan Series and lost it, and it should have been the story.

The morning after the series ended, prosecutors and investigators searched the players' dormitories. Twenty-six people connected to 兄弟象 were caught up in what became the fifth and largest match-fixing investigation in the league's twenty years, and the club lost its manager and a row of front-line players inside a fortnight. The manager, 中込伸, was charged, pleaded guilty in exchange for a suspended sentence, and has said in interviews since that he was innocent and did it for his family. When investigators finished in February 2010, sixty-seven people were implicated and thirty-five current or former players had admitted involvement and surrendered what they had been paid.

The club very nearly folded. It won the championship the next year anyway, then was sold to 中信 at the end of 2013.

The ballpark closed after typhoon damage in 2025 and stages no professional games now. The seventeen-inning game is the best thing that ever happened on that field, and it happened two days before the worst.

📸 Cover: Photo by Kc0616, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons — the ballpark under lights, 2006.