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10/08/2003 Archived Entry: "Taiwan Baseball News: 2003 Regular Season Comes to an End"
2003 Regular Season Comes to an End
by Paul Huang
The 2003 CPBL regular season ended on October 6th with many arguing it being the most eventful season in the CPBLˇ¦s 14-year history.
The merger between the two rivaling leagues, Taiwan Major League (TML) and the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) that kicked off the season in March had many experts expressing much uncertainty. Then came the slow start for the defending champs, the Brother Elephants, going 3-10-1 in the first month.
As far as personal achievements go, Sinon Bulls slugger Chang Tai-shan began his quest to rewrite baseball history with his 100th career homer in May to become the youngest player ever to accomplish such feat. After collecting his 100th long bomb, Chang went on to claim the double-century mark (100 homer and 100 stolen bases), the fastest to knock in 500 runs, the most homers in a single season, and the 20-20 mark (20 homers and 20 stolen bases in the same season).
Since their 3-10-1 start, the Elephants have gone 60-21-5 to finish the season with the highest winning percentage in league history and gotten a ticket into the postseason for the chance to claim an unprecedented fourth straight championship in a row. It was the CPBLˇ¦s most dramatic turnaround ever.
The race for most stolen bases in the season went down the wire as four-time defending champ Huang Kang-lin of the President Lions overcame a 10-plus base deficit late in the season to beat out Whale outfielder Chi Jung-lin by one stolen base on the last game of the season for his fifth stolen base title in a row.
Putting aside all the glory and excitement, the season had its share of problems as an automobile carrying four players in April ram into a tree in a near-fatal accident. President Lions shortstop Hsu Sheng-jeh was hospitalized for over a month due tot the accident, which caused him to miss nearly four months. The off-field troubles continued in the CPBL as the Elephantsˇ¦ team bus got into a highway race with a truck in August that ended with four players breaking the leg of the opposing truck driver, only days after the star player on the team was wrongfully accused of taking illegal substance and attending wild sex parties.
Despite its ups and downs, the seven-month long regular season has finally come to an end, and the postseason will begin this weekend in Kaohsiung where the Elephants will host the Bulls in Games 1 and 2 of the best-of-seven Taiwan Series. It will be the highest rated postseason matchup ever because the two competing teams in the past 13 years had never had a closer regular-season record than the Elephants and the Bulls had this year.
The long-standing curse that the team with either the batting champ or the homerun king for the season has never won it all will definitely be over, because this yearˇ¦s batting champ Peng Cheng-ming of the Elephants will face homerun king Chang Tai-shan of the Bulls in the 2003 Taiwan Series.
