By Bill Thompson, Words Above Replacement

As I wrote about on this very site a couple of weeks back there is a chance that there will be baseball soon. Not from Major League Baseball or any affiliated outlet, but from a trio of Asian countries that took earlier measures to deal with COVID-19. One of those countries is Taiwan and on April 11th a new season of the Chinese Professional Baseball League is all set to kick off.

Relatively speaking the CPBL is a younger league, coming into existence in 1989. In a short amount of time baseball became very popular in Taiwan and that hasn’t changed as the years have gone by. After the CPBL survived a challenge from, and eventually absorbed, the Taiwan Major League, it’s been mostly smooth sailing for Taiwan’s premier professional baseball league. I say premier and not lone because the CPBL does have a minor professional league, the Future League.

A typical CPBL season lasts 120 games. The playoffs that follow consist of a wild card round (sometimes), and a Taiwan Series. Breaking down the CPBL playoffs is a tad complicated, and what I’m about to write is based on the aforementioned 120 game schedule. We know that the league likely won’t play that many games this year, but let’s give it a go.

The CPBL operates under a first half and second half regular season format. Each half is 60 games. There can potentially be a best-of-five Wild Card Series. The last two teams standing play in a best of seven Taiwan Series to determine the league champion. Here are the various scenarios that can happen in the playoffs.

One team wins the first half, a second team wins the second half and they face each other in the best-of-seven game Taiwan Series. One team wins both halves. They get an automatic bye to the Taiwan Series and are awarded a default 1-0 lead in that series. The next two teams in the standings play in the best-of-five Wild Card Series to see who gets to advance to play in the Taiwan Series. A team manages to have the best overall winning percentage but they did not win either half. That team will get to play in the best-of-five Wild Card Series against the half-season winner with the lower winning percentage. The half-season winner with the higher winning percentage gets a bye to the Taiwan Series to face the eventual winner of the Wild Card Series, and they still get a 1-0 lead in that series.

The actual baseball that is played in the CPBL is your typical baseball. There aren’t any wild or zany rules to worry about. The CPBL does use the designated hitter. The only key difference to keep in mind is that games only go 12 innings and they can be declared a draw if tied after that time. Due to COVID-19, this year’s games will be played in empty stadiums. That will certainly drag the atmosphere down but I’m interested to see how it plays out. There are some things to know when it comes to the style of play, but we’ll get into that a little further down.

Roster construction in the CPBL is a little different. Each team carries around 60 players on their full roster. Of those 60 only 26 are active with the main club on game day. CPBL teams are limited to four foreign players, with only three of those being on the main team. In addition, a team can only have 2 foreigners on the field at the same time. The overwhelming majority of the time these foreigners are pitchers with position player foreigners being quite the rarity. There has been some talk of the league relaxing roster limits on foreign players in the future and that is something I personally believe will happen.

There are four teams in the CPBL with a fifth to come in 2021. For the 2020 season, the teams are the Rakuten Monkeys, Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions, Fubon Guardians, and Chinatrust Brothers. The Monkeys used to be known as the Lamigo Monkeys and they are the current dynasty in the CPBL. To be perfectly honest, it’s tough to see any CPBL squad unseating them any time soon. The Monkeys have won 6 out of the last 8 Taiwan Series titles. They scout better, bring in better foreigners, have more money to work with, and are the class of the league. In 2021, the Wei-Chuan Dragons will move from the Future League to the CPBL proper.

The overall level of play found in Taiwan varies. If I had to put a hard rank on it the CPBL is generally around a High-A-level league. There’s plenty of talent above that level throughout the league, but there’s more than enough Rookie-level talent that High-A sounds about right. The level of play can be seen in the typically high scoring affairs that constitute a CPBL season. There’s lots of offense to be found in Taiwan. The league is offensive-minded, and while there is a wealth of quality starting pitching the general level of fielding is still only average at best and the bullpens often play a game where they see which one can give up more runs.

When it comes to watching the league you are in luck. CPBL TV costs $35/year and it live streams every single CPBL game, including the playoffs. In addition to that CPBL TV also has live streams of every Future League game that takes place on Friday through Sunday and the entirety of the FL championship Future Series. Wait, there’s more, included in that price is every game of the Asia Winter Baseball League that takes place from the end of November to the beginning of December. CPBL Stats has a wonderful English guide on how to sign up for CPBL TV. There have been rumblings that Twitch may stream games for free this year and that the Yahoo Live streams, also free, will be up and running again. If that happens I will certainly provide an update to this article.

There are some obvious drawbacks to CPBL games, notably, broadcast time. Games start around 1 am to 3 am and that does represent a problem for people who aren’t night owls. You won’t find any CPBL stats on Baseball Reference, and while there are other alternatives for digging into players, stats and the like you need to be willing to use Google Translate often.

To all of that, I say this, it’s baseball. The CPBL is fun, high quality, professional baseball that you can watch while there’s no MLB or affiliated baseball to take up your time. Personally I think you should have been watching CPBL well before now. I became a fan, go Monkeys go, almost four years ago and it’s one of the best decisions I ever made. The baseball is fun, there’s a large online fanbase, heck, just watch the CPBL already, you’ll thank me later.