CPBL | The Loss That Gave Taiwan a Catchphrase (Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium)

More than twenty thousand people got into 台中洲際棒球場 on 5 March 2013 for the World Baseball Classic pool game between Taiwan and Korea, and the ones who could not get tickets watched at home in numbers Taiwanese cable television had never recorded. Taiwan led 2:0 after seven innings. In the bottom of the eighth, 姜正浩 turned it around with one swing, and Korea won 3:2.

Taiwan advanced anyway, first in the group on run differential, and Korea went home. That was not the part anyone remembered. The commentator 徐展元 cried on air and said 好想贏韓國 — I so badly want to beat Korea — and the line entered the language. It is still what people quote when they talk about that tournament, a phrase born out of a defeat in a game Taiwan's team had already effectively won.

The tournament run mattered beyond that night. Taiwan reached the last eight for the first time, with 王建民 back on the mound, and the country rediscovered baseball at exactly the moment the CPBL needed it. League attendance had sat under three thousand a game for three straight years after the 2009 match-fixing case. In 2013 it more than doubled.

Thirteen years later, on 8 March 2026 in the WBC, Taiwan beat Korea 5:4 in extra innings — the first time it had ever done so at this tournament.

洲際 is out in 北屯 at the top of Taichung. It is a bigger, better-run ballpark than it was in 2013, and it still fills for games that matter.

📸 Cover: Photo by けやきま, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — the ballpark during the 2023 World Baseball Classic, ten years after this game.