MLB | The First One Through the Door (Chen Chin-feng's debut, Coors Field, Denver)

He pinch-hit for Paul Lo Duca in the sixth inning, took four balls, and jogged down to first. That was the whole of it.

On 14 September 2002 at Coors Field, Chen Chin-feng (陳金鋒) became the first player born in Taiwan to appear in a Major League Baseball game. He walked, came round to score, and Los Angeles beat Colorado 16-3. The Dodgers had recalled him from Triple-A Las Vegas five days earlier.

Taiwanese and English coverage alike still hands that distinction to Chien-Ming Wang, and the correction is not pedantry. Chen went through the door first. Wang, Chin-Hui Tsao, Hong-Chih Kuo and Wei-Yin Chen went through it after him.

What he did in the majors is quickly told. Nineteen games across four seasons, twenty-two at-bats, two hits, a batting average of .091, never more than eight appearances in a year, and a last game on 20 July 2005. The first hit by a Taiwanese position player was his, a two-run single in 2005. The first hit by any Taiwanese player belongs to Tsao, a pitcher: on 18 August 2003 he broke up Steve Trachsel's no-hit bid with what turned out to be Colorado's only hit of the day.

So the interesting thing is the distance between the record and the reputation. The Dodgers signed Chen out of Taiwan in January 1999 and sent him to San Bernardino in the California League, where in his first professional season he became the first player in that league's history to hit thirty home runs and steal thirty bases in the same year. He and Joc Pederson are the only two Dodgers minor leaguers on record with a 30-30 season. Then came shoulder surgery in 2000. The explosiveness did not come back, scouts downgraded the tools one by one, and the outfield in Los Angeles never opened up.

He went home instead, and became the most important ballplayer in his country. That part is filed separately.

Visiting. Coors Field opened in 1995 in Denver's Lower Downtown, sits high enough that the club started keeping its baseballs in a humidor in 2002, and marks one mile above sea level with a single row of purple seats in the upper deck. Chen's debut is not commemorated anywhere in it.

Cover: Coors Field, 2022. Photo: Troutfarm27, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the exterior of Coors Field, 15 July 2007. Photo: Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.