MLB | Twenty Thousand and Fifty-Two (Chen Chin-feng's last game, Taoyuan)

The attendance was 20,052. The visitors were the EDA Rhinos, and the Lamigo Monkeys lost 13-9, which nobody remembers. People had come for the cleanup hitter.

Chen Chin-feng played the last game of his professional career at Taoyuan International Baseball Stadium on 18 September 2016, aged thirty-eight, batting fourth as designated hitter. It was the largest crowd for a CPBL regular-season game to that point and the first time this ground had held more than twenty thousand; the record stood until Peng Cheng-min's farewell at Taichung in 2019. Lamigo retired his number 52 and raised a statue of him. He did not cry at the ceremony. He thanked his parents, said they had never actually wanted him to play baseball, and told the ground that the thing he was proudest of was not anything he had done on a field.

Eleven years earlier he had left the major leagues with two hits in twenty-two at-bats. The reputation was never built there.

It was built against other countries' best pitchers. A home run off Chan Ho Park at the 1998 Asian Games in Bangkok, which is what first put American scouts on him. Five more and the home run title at the 1998 World Cup. Two against Japan at the 2001 World Cup. One off Kōji Uehara at the Athens Olympics in 2004. Then on 3 December 2007 in Taichung, sixth inning, two out, a man on, Chinese Taipei a run down with an Olympic place at stake, a two-run home run off Yu Darvish, that season's Pacific League MVP, whose own Japanese broadcast had captioned Chen on screen as the batter their manager least wanted to face.

Afterwards he moved into coaching. In 2017 he lit the cauldron at the Taipei Universiade. In 2023 he was elected to the Taiwan Baseball Hall of Fame, the youngest member at that point and the first former major leaguer among the thirty-five inducted so far.

Visiting. The ground opened in 2009 at Qingpu in Zhongli and has been the Rakuten Taoyuan Baseball Stadium since Rakuten took over the club in 2019. Taoyuan Metro A19, Taoyuan Sports Park, is on the airport line and puts you at the gate. Number 52 still hangs inside.

Cover: Chen Chin-feng batting at his retirement game, Taoyuan, 18 September 2016. Photo: Gene Wang, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: Chen lighting the cauldron at the opening ceremony of the 2017 Summer Universiade in Taipei, 19 August 2017. Official photo, Office of the President (總統府), Taiwan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.