he Taint of Scandal in Taiwan's Pro League

On Monday, prosecutors opened an investigation into whether players in Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League deliberately lost games in exchange for payoffs. Former players and alleged gambling ringleaders have been detained. On Wednesday, the police questioned nine more players, eight were named as suspects, according to local media.
The allegations include the play of the Brother Elephants, the island’s most popular team, as it lost the Taiwan Series to the Uni-President 7-11 Lions. The Lions won the seventh, and final, game Sunday.
Taiwan’s 20-year old professional baseball league has been plagued by such corruption scandals. Gangsters have in the past intimidated players, but this time, a spokesman said, prosecutors have ruled out the possibility that players were threatened or intimidated.
But league officials had been upbeat recently, saying game attendance had bounced back this season, that the government was doing more to promote the game and that the tiny league — numbering only four teams after others folded amid scandal or financial losses — was retrenching.
For many Taiwanese, the stakes are far higher than a mere sport’s survival. Baseball is one of the few arenas in which Taiwan has won recognition on the world stage.
“In the past, we used baseball to raise our morale and reinforce our national identity,” said Yu Jun-wei, author of a recent book on the history of baseball in Taiwan and a professor at National Taiwan Sport University in Taichung. “It still serves a political purpose. China always says we’re part of their territory. But we can use baseball to prove to ourselves and others that we still exist in international society.”
Yu said the scandal was especially damaging because it involved the Brother Elephants and one of its top stars — the pitcher Tsao Chin-hui, the first Taiwanese to have played in U.S. major league baseball, for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Colorado Rockies.
Tsao was one reason attendance rose this season, his first in Taiwan’s professional league, reaching an average of 4,000 per game, double last year’s dismal showing, according to the league.
Tsao maintains his innocence but said prosecutors had searched his home.
Richard Wang, director of international affairs for the league, said prosecutors had searched the Brother Elephants’ dormitory Monday, seized three cellphones and detained two former baseball players. He said on Tuesday that the league had been “hurt badly” by the latest allegations.
“It’s devastating, for sure,” Wang said. “If what the media said is true — that players were voluntarily cooperating with bookies — that’s really bad news.”
“In the past, players were throwing games under pressure and threats from the mafia. If this time there were no threats or pressure, and it was just the players’ greed, that’s really sad.”
The Japanese brought baseball to Taiwan after they colonized the island in 1895.
Taiwan’s string of Little League titles in the 1970s confirmed that the game was a rare arena for the island to shine internationally. The victories were a sorely needed morale booster in a decade in which the United States broke diplomatic ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing as the legitimate government of China and Taiwan lost representation in the United Nations.
Many Little League heroes went on to play in Taiwan’s first professional league, established with high hopes in 1990.
Since the peak of “baseball fever” in the early 1990s, though, the game’s fortunes have waned. Attendance has plummeted, as has television viewership, especially after satellite channels brought U.S. Major League Baseball and basketball into Taiwan homes.