Baseball - CPBL the only league to have opened in 2020

Due to the pandemic, most sports leagues across the world have been shutdown.

CPBL became the first professional baseball league to open the 2020 season on April 12, albeit without a live audiences. However, the games gained international attention since there’s pretty much no sports anywhere else.

The games are broadcasted on line through Twitch, and Japan’s Pacific League TV. As a result, the popular baseball statistics website Baseball Reference added stats from all of CPBL’s history.

The season was supposed to open on the 11th with Rakuten Monkeys, but the game got rained out. So yesterday was the Monkeys’ first game, and it ended with a walk off from Zhu Yu-hsien who had already hit 2 home runs in previous innings

There’s even English broadcasting of the game

https://twitter.com/ElevenSportsJP/status/1250450601260941317

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Having “Chinese” in the name of the league ruins all of it.

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Honestly, when the two leagues merged, they should have kept the TML name.

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That’s why you hardly ever hear the full name said anymore; it’s just CPBL, kind of like CPC.

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I think the Russian Slapping Alliance has started its season

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In the most unexpected twist of fate, the CPBL catapaulting to the status of worlds only operating pro basrball league.

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i’m not particularly interested in baseball but them being the only professional league active atm, they should gain some profits from that. any info on whether us tv stations are interested in buying their tv rights?

(sports) people are pretty desperate, i remember the first few days after nhl suspended operations my twitter was full of hockey nerds linking to the belarusian hockey league because it was the only one that went on.

I don’t think the league will be able to generate that much revenue for being the only baseball league active in the world. There are TV stations in Japan which purchased rights to broadcast the games. The rest are only available through online streaming platforms such as Twitch. At the end of the day it’s not going to make up for not having live audiences.

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The Rakuten Monkeys game was live streamed on twitter by Eleven Sports in English

https://twitter.com/ElevenSportsTW

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I just think its funny to picture Americans sitting at hone watching it, knowing the players. "Look honey, its lin chih sheng hitting 3rd again…whats with these ugly yellow jerseys…

I love how much press tw is getting lately in the states

https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/13/sports/baseball/13reuters-health-coronavirus-taiwan.html

The football league also started last Sunday and it has been featured on many magazines worldwide.

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Keith Olbermann woke up early just to watch Taiwan baseball.

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This is remarkable.

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In this live stream, Keith talked about his thoughts on watching Taiwan baseball, and how Tsai Ying-wen was at Cornell when he was an undergrad there.

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Are they streaming any college or HS baseball at all?

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Interesting how little attention college baseball gets.

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True, especially with most prospects going to college first. Aluminum bats turn people off?

The problem with Taiwan’s college baseball, and even high school baseball is that they are organized in an array of short and unrelated tournaments throughout the entire year.

So instead of following a team for a season like cheering for a team to get into the NCAA College World Series, or just pay attention to one important tournament, like March Madness or Koshien, there are 15 independent college baseball tournaments.

While it’s good that players almost get to play year around, it also means none of the tournaments are really all that important. It’s hard for fans to know when to watch, or build a tradition to follow one tournament. It’s also hard for players to be a regular student when they are not playing ball, since they are always playing ball. It’s bad for players to be playing all year without a chance to rest.

Back in 2009, as a fan representative, I made suggestions in the Baseball Reform Meeting with Zhu Li-lun (former KMT presidential candidate) who was the vice premier at the time to consolidate tournaments or at least link the existing ones into rounds working towards a final tournament.

But of course, it fell on deaf ears.

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