MLB | The Ballpark in the City That Made Him (Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium)

On 4 July 2020, when most of the world's professional sport was still stopped, 5,577 people came to Tainan to watch the Uni-Lions play the Brothers. It was the Lions' largest home crowd of the season and close to a sell-out, because the CPBL was capping the ground at 6,000 under checkerboard seating. The American Institute in Taiwan and the Tainan city government had built the fixture into an Independence Day event. Chien-Ming Wang and Hong-Chih Kuo threw the ceremonial first pitches to Kao Chih-kang, with Liu Po-chun, Taiwan's first female umpire, behind the plate. Wang wore Yankee pinstripes. The Brothers won 7-2.

Taiwan spent that spring as one of the very few places on earth with a professional league still playing. It had spent the 2000s as the place that stayed up until three in the morning for one pitcher. Holding the ceremony in Tainan was not an accident.

Wang was born on 31 March 1980 in Guanmiao Township, Tainan County, which is now Guanmiao District of Tainan City, and grew up in the city itself. He joined the basketball team at Chongxue Elementary because he was tall and did not like studying, then put his name down for baseball at a squad trial and pitched instead. At Jianxing Junior High he was coached by Chang Hsi-chieh, whose other graduates include Hong-Chih Kuo and Chin-Lung Hu. This is a youth baseball town in a specific, countable way: of the seventeen Little League World Series titles Taiwan won between 1969 and 1996, five went to teams from Tainan.

Visiting, and please read this part first. The ground is not currently staging top-flight professional baseball. A typhoon in July 2025 wrecked the grandstand canopies, the Uni-Lions played the rest of that season away from home, and demolition of the first- and third-base canopy structures went ahead in 2026 at the club's own expense. From the 2026 season the Lions rent the main stadium at the Tainan Asia-Pacific International Baseball Training Center in Annan District instead. The Health Road ground stays under Uni-Lions management as a training site, and the club has said it hopes to let supporters back into the stands in some form one day. Check the current position before you travel.

Cover: Chien-Ming Wang at the America Day event at Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium, 4 July 2020. Official photo by Simon Liu, Office of the President (總統府), Taiwan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the field at Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium, 25 July 2015. Photo: Chi-Hung Lin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.