MLB | Forty Taiwanese Reporters and 101 Degrees (Nationals Park, Washington)

More than forty Taiwanese journalists were credentialled for a Friday night game between two teams going nowhere. Fourteen cameras photographed a man climbing the dugout steps to warm up. In Taipei, thousands watched on a screen in a public square. The temperature at Nationals Park was 101 degrees.

Chien-Ming Wang pitched in the major leagues on 29 July 2011 for the first time since 4 July 2009. In between there had been surgery to repair a torn capsule in his right shoulder, a 2010 season spent entirely in rehabilitation in Viera, Florida, and a Washington Nationals contract that kept paying him more than $3 million while he threw to nobody. He lost the game to the Mets. Through an interpreter afterwards he said he was happy, that it had been a long time, and that he was back.

The comeback was real and it was small. On 9 August he allowed one hit in six innings at Wrigley Field and beat the Cubs, his first win at any major league level since June 2009. A week later, back here, he went six and a third against Cincinnati, his longest outing since the start before the foot injury. He finished 2011 at 4-3 with a 4.04 ERA in eleven starts and 2012 at 2-3 with a 6.68. On 24 September 2011 he got his first major league hit, off Atlanta's Brandon Beachy, in his seventh season. He retired with two hits in thirty-nine at-bats.

Five more years of trying followed. Six starts for Toronto in 2013. Triple-A with four organisations, and a stretch with the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs of the independent Atlantic League. Twelve weeks rebuilding his delivery at a Texas pitching ranch over the winter of 2015. Then Kansas City in 2016, where at thirty-six he went 6-0 out of the bullpen, and where on 3 May at Kauffman Stadium he struck out the side in the ninth, Bryce Harper included, and got the win when the Royals walked it off. His last major league appearance, on 30 August 2016, was against the Yankees. A film crew had been following him since 2015; the documentary is Late Life: The Chien-Ming Wang Story, released in 2018.

Visiting. Nationals Park opened in 2008 in Navy Yard, on the Anacostia waterfront, and ordinary walk-up seats on the first-base side put you close to the mound he came back on. Washington is usually treated as a footnote in his career. It was the club that paid for two years of rehabilitation with no guarantee of a single inning in return.

Cover: Chien-Ming Wang pitching for Washington, photographed 29 July 2011, the day of his return. Photo: dbking, cropped by UCinternational, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: Nationals Park from behind home plate, 2011. Photo: Something Original, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.