CPBL | The Ballpark That Predates the League (Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium)

臺南市立棒球場 was finished on 31 January 1931, fifty-nine years before there was a professional league to put in it. Ground was broken the previous November on burial land outside the old south gate, near 五妃廟. The budget was 16,000 yen, the stands held about nine hundred people, and 台南市尹 菱村彥十郎 pushed it through as the most substantial purpose-built ballpark on the island.

It kept collecting firsts. Taiwan's first double-deck grandstand. In 1999, 統一獅 took over its management, the first CPBL club anywhere to adopt a ground as its own, and grassed over the infield dirt, which made it the country's first grass infield too. In the early years the outfield wall was low enough that fans went over it after big games, so the wall got taller. By the 2010s the stands held twelve thousand. From 1999 to 2007 there was even a 7-Eleven trading inside the first-base entrance, opened by the club's parent company and closed when the club took the space back for its own use.

Then in July 2025 typhoon 丹娜絲 peeled steel sheeting off the infield roof and dropped it into the seats. Engineers closed the ground. 統一獅 played out that season on the road at 新莊 and 澄清湖, and from 2026 their home dates moved across town to the 亞太國際棒球場 in 安南區 under a rental agreement with the city. The club paid about NT$7 million to have the canopies taken down on both sides and kept the old ground for training.

There is no public baseball on 健康路 now. You can see the bowl from the street, its grandstand stripped back to the frame, and nobody in Tainan will tell you what happens to it next.

📸 Cover: Photo by Chi-Hung Lin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons — the field during the 2015 WBSC U12 World Cup, a decade before the typhoon damage.