CPBL | The Month Six Teams Became Four (Chiayi Municipal Baseball Stadium)

嘉義市立棒球場 has been taking baseball since 1918, when it opened as 嘉義公園野球場 and was called the finest park ground in Taiwan. It is still the oldest venue the CPBL uses. It was also 中信鯨's home, which is why the league's worst month has an address here.

On 8 October 2008 prosecutors raided the offices and dormitories of 米迪亞暴龍. The following day the league suspended the club and cancelled its last two fixtures; on 23 October the board of directors voted to expel it outright, and the commissioner announced that even a sale to new owners would not buy the franchise back in. This was the first case in which the accusations ran through the front office rather than the clubhouse. A civil judgment the next year ordered the club's owner to pay the league NT$10 million.

Then, on 11 November 2008, the 中信鯨 organisation called a press conference with the league and dissolved the club, releasing every player and coach without compensation so other teams could take them. In one month the CPBL went from six teams to four, where it stayed until 2019.

The ballpark outlasted both. Chiayi rebuilt it in 1998, spent NT$121 million more on stands, turf, drainage and a scoreboard in 2020, and 富邦悍將 used it as a spring base and second-division home in the early 2020s. Sit in the stands and you are in a park that opened when Taiwanese baseball was thirty years old and is still standing after everything that has been done to the professional game.

📸 Cover: Photo by Joe Wu, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.