CPBL | The First Pitch of the 2020 Baseball World (Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium)

On 12 April 2020, 米蘭達 of 中信兄弟 threw a fastball to 陳傑憲 of 統一獅 at 台中洲際棒球場, and roughly 20,000 seats watched it happen. The stands were sealed. Every other professional baseball league on earth was shut down, so this was the only game being played anywhere, and the sound carried on the broadcast: coaches shouting, spikes on dirt, the ball hitting the mitt.

The CPBL had pushed its opening back twice, from mid-March to 11 April, and the other opening-day fixture was called off for a waterlogged field, which left Taichung to open the world's baseball year by itself. 鄭鎧文 of 統一獅 hit a home run in the second inning, the first of the 2020 season anywhere. The league arranged an English-language broadcast for an audience abroad that had not existed a month earlier, and foreign networks queued up for the feed.

Then it kept going. On 8 May the CPBL became the first professional league anywhere to let spectators back in, starting at a thousand a game and loosening from there. By that autumn's Taiwan Series, this ballpark was posting sellouts at 15,600.

洲際 opened in 2006 out at the northern edge of Taichung in 北屯 and became 中信兄弟's adopted home in 2015; the club has been putting money into it ever since. Games here fill the place now. Stand at the top of the infield stands on a normal Friday night and it is very hard to reconstruct what April 2020 sounded like.

📸 Cover: Photo by Macro Monster, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons — exterior, 2018.