CPBL | The Season a Team Ran Out of Players (Taipei Municipal Stadium site)

The unravelling started with an anonymous letter in June 1996 accusing a manager of throwing games, and it ended with two of the league's founding clubs gone. In between, prosecutors worked through the 時報鷹 roster: between January and March 1997 thirteen of the club's players were summoned and detained, and a second wave that June took nine more. By midsummer the Eagles had two local players left. The other clubs lent them reserves so the fixture list could be completed, and Taiwanese fans learned the phrase 二代鷹 — the second-generation Eagles, a team of borrowed men finishing a season their predecessors had won the first half of.

The league voted the club a one-year suspension. On 15 September 1998 the Eagles' general manager formally asked the owners' meeting to dissolve the franchise, and it was approved. 三商虎 and 味全龍 both folded the following year. Attendance fell off a cliff and stayed there for a decade; the courts took years, and the convictions that eventually landed mostly carried suspended sentences.

Four more investigations followed, in 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Across the league's first twenty years, close to a hundred Taiwanese players were banned or never came back. Every club in the league had players investigated.

All of it happened while 台北市立棒球場 was the league's main stage. The ballpark closed at the end of 2000 and 台北小巨蛋 (Taipei Arena) stands on the ground. The crowds that stopped coming in 1997 did not return in numbers until 2013.

📸 Cover: Photo by Foxy Who, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons — Taipei Arena, on the ballpark site (site view, 2009).