CPBL | The Three Months Manny Ramirez Played Here (Chengcing Lake Baseball Stadium)

Roughly twenty thousand people came to 澄清湖棒球場 on 27 March 2013 to watch a forty-year-old designated hitter take his first at-bat in Taiwan. Manny Ramirez had 555 home runs and two World Series rings behind him, and two drug suspensions that had finished his major-league career. 義大犀牛 had just bought the old 興農牛 franchise, needed the country to notice, and signed him for about US$50,000 a month.

The country noticed. Eleven of his first twenty games drew crowds over ten thousand, three of them full houses. On 4 April, in front of a packed 台南球場, he hit his first CPBL home run, which happened to be the league's seven-thousandth. League attendance had been stuck under three thousand a game for three seasons after the 2009 match-fixing case; in 2013 it hit 6,079, and while he was still here it was running above seven thousand.

Then in June he told the club he was homesick and wanted to go. They tried to keep him. He left on 21 June, having played 49 games and hit .352 with 8 home runs and 43 runs batted in — which at forty-one is a serious line, whatever brought him here.

The team he played for no longer exists; 富邦悍將 bought the franchise in 2016 and moved it north. But 澄清湖 has a resident club again, and the ballpark that briefly held a Boston legend now belongs to 台鋼雄鷹.

📸 Cover: Photo by 勤岸, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons — the infield entrance, 2012, the year before this season.