MLB | The One Who Came By Way of Japan (Wei-Yin Chen's debut, Oriole Park at Camden Yards)

At seven in the morning on 11 April 2012, three Taiwanese television networks carried the same baseball game live. The Orioles put the expected audience at up to two million. Fifteen reporters from nine Taiwanese outlets were at Camden Yards, where it was a cold Tuesday night and Wei-Yin Chen (陳偉殷) was about to throw his first major league pitch. Derek Jeter hit it over the centre field wall, the twenty-fifth time he had opened a game with a home run. Nick Swisher doubled behind it. Chen said afterwards, through an interpreter, that he had been extremely nervous until the first inning ended, and then he settled: five and two-thirds innings, seven hits, six strikeouts, one walk, two earned runs. A Mark Reynolds error in the sixth let in two more that were not his. He left at 4-4 with a no-decision and New York won it 5-4 in twelve. What separates him from the Taiwanese who went before is the route. Chen Chin-feng, Chin-Hui Tsao and Chien-Ming Wang were all signed out of Taiwan as teenagers and ground up through the American minor leagues. Chen went to Japan. The Chunichi Dragons took him in 2003 at eighteen, he debuted for them in 2005, he led the Central League in earned run average in 2009 at 1.54, and by the end of 2011 he had the service time to leave as a free agent. No posting fee was owed, which is precisely why Baltimore could afford him: three years and about $11.4 million with a club option, and no auction against richer teams. He was the first Taiwan-born player to sign with a major league club directly out of Nippon Professional Baseball, and the first Taiwanese player the Orioles ever signed. He was good, and then he was expensive. Chen led the 2012 Orioles with 32 starts and finished fourth in American League Rookie of the Year voting for a club that reached the postseason for the first time since 1997. On 29 July that year he struck out twelve Athletics in five and two-thirds innings, taking the strikeout record for a Taiwanese pitcher off Wang. He won sixteen games in 2014. Across four seasons in Baltimore he had the lowest earned run average and the most starts and innings of any Orioles starter, which is the club's own accounting of him. Then in January 2016 Miami gave him five years and $80 million, the largest guaranteed contract for a pitcher in Marlins history and the largest any Taiwanese player has signed, and his elbow and shoulder spent most of it letting him down. The first two years of that deal produced 31 appearances. He left the majors with 59 wins and 846 strikeouts, having thrown more innings and made more starts than Wang while winning nine fewer games. After that came Chiba Lotte, Hanshin, and the Long Island Ducks of the independent Atlantic League. The ending is the part worth noticing. Chen announced his retirement on Facebook in February 2025, at thirty-nine, after twenty years, saying he could no longer perform at the level he wanted to. Baltimore put out a statement calling him the first Taiwanese player in club history. And on 16 March 2025 he threw a ceremonial pitch to mark the end of it, not in Baltimore and not in Kaohsiung, but at the Vantelin Dome in Nagoya, for the club that had taken him at eighteen. Visiting. Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened in 1992 and is the ballpark that every ballpark built since has been copying. Behind right field stands the B&O warehouse, which the club bills as the longest building on the American east coast; Eutaw Street, the promenade between it and the seats, is generally open to the public outside game days. Cover: Wei-Yin Chen at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, 13 April 2015, against the Yankees, the opponent he made his debut against three years earlier. Photo: Keith Allison, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: Chen pitching for the Chunichi Dragons, 28 August 2011, in his last NPB season before Baltimore. Photo: shi.k, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.