How come there aren’t more Taiwanese in baseball’s major leagues? We’re getting players from Korea and Japan, why not Taiwan, long a power on the Little League levels.
Why doesn’t that translate to major league success?
Maybe it has something to do with their mandatory two-year military service.
. . . by which I mean: right around the time they’re finished with Little League, teenage boys are generally prohibited from leaving the island (unless things have changed in the past decade or so). Furthermore, college students only get a deferment for the military service, not an exception, so any prominent college player will see his skills atrophy as he marks time squatting on some windswept offshore island.
These are WAGs, by the way.
Didn’t stop Willie Mays, though. And Koreans have the same commitment, but we’re seeing Korean players in the majors.
Taiwan’s system was always geared towards keeping its players at home. Taiwanese pro teams have a “Lifetime contract” system that basically keeps the players as property of their teams. The Taiwanese pro league has always been of suspect quality and has been accused of corruption. Furthemore, Taiwanese players who have wanted to play good pro baseball have usually fled to Japan, and it’s not easy for Japanese League players to make the jump to North America. That none of them have happened to be Taiwanese-born is just sort of a fluke.
However, in recent years a number of Taiwanese players have left Taiwan and are now in the U.S. minors, so you’ll start to see them popping up. Chen Chin-Feng of the L.A. Dodgers is a particularly promising young player; he’s off to a good start in AAA this year and will probably become the first Taiwanese-born player to make the majors; he’s hitting .291 with power for Las Vegas. Still strikes out a lot, but he’ll be up before long.