CPBL | The Night the Crowd Shouted for a Dome (Taipei Municipal Stadium site)

Game seven of the 1991 Taiwan Series was well under way at 台北市立棒球場 when the rain came down hard enough to stop it. More than 13,000 people were in the stands, 味全龍 and 統一獅 had split the first six games of the series, and Premier 郝柏村 was sitting among them under the weather.

Nobody left. What rose out of the wet grandstand was a chant: 郝院長，我們要巨蛋 — Premier Hao, we want a dome. Fans here had watched enough Japanese baseball on television to know that Tokyo had a roof and that their own season kept dissolving into rain-outs. Play resumed. The game ran past the last trains and finished at 11:40 that night, with 統一獅 taking the franchise's first championship. Within days 郝柏村 had instructed officials to start planning a covered stadium.

It took another thirty-two years. The dome went into the national construction programme in 1993, then drifted between sites: 關渡 flats, the 中山 football ground, finally the old 松山 tobacco works. Six Taipei mayors, a BOT contract, a construction halt and a long safety review later, 台北大巨蛋 opened for baseball in 2024. The league's own dome history begins with this rainy night, and Far Glory's official chronology says so on the first line.

The ballpark where the shouting happened did not survive the wait. It closed at the end of 2000, and 台北小巨蛋 (Taipei Arena) went up on the site. The dome those fans asked for sits a little over a kilometre to the south-east, roughly twenty minutes on foot.

📸 Cover: Photo by lienyuan lee, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons — Taipei Arena, standing on the ballpark site (site view).