2021 CPBL Season 1st Team Map

On January 29, the CPBL announced the 2021 season home game locations for the first teams.

As always, the Rakuten Monkeys and the Fubon Guardians are sticking with their deep root localisation strategy and will play all 60 home games in their adopted city.

The CTBC Brothers and the Uni-Lions focused most of their home games in their adopted city but will have 5-10 games in other cities.

Lastly, we have the CPBL expansion team, the Wei Chuan Dragons and their spray chart. Since the Dragons adopted home city’s stadium is still under construction and will not be ready until the end of 2021, they will travel quite a bit and spread their home games across six different locations in Taiwan.

According to the CPBL, the 2021 schedule is likely to come out before the 2021 lunar new year holiday.

Note #1: The Dragons are renting Xinzhuang Stadium (the Guardians’ home facility) for two games this season.

Note #2: Despite not having a professional team, the city of Kaohsiung will host 23 games this season, is Kaohsiung city testing the water and with the goal of establishing a new expansion team?

TeamLocationStadiumHome Games
MonkeysTaoyuan CityTaoyuan Stadium60
GuardiansNew Taipei CityXinzhuang Stadium60
BrothersTaichung CityTaichung Intercontinental Stadium55
BrothersKaohsiung CityChengqing Lake Stadium5
Uni-LionsTainan CityTainan Stadium50
Uni-LionsKaohsiung CityChengqing Lake Stadium5
Uni-LionsHualien CountyHualien Stadium5
DragonsTaipei CityTianmu Stadium31
DragonsKaohsiung CityChengqing Lake Stadium18
DragonsChiayi CityChiayi City Stadium4
DragonsHualien CountyHualien Stadium3
DragonsYunlin CountyDouliu Stadium2
DragonsNew Taipei CityXinzhuang Stadium2

9 COMMENTS

  1. I still think Taiwan could support six CPBL teams. Greater Taipei has 8.5 million people per Wikipedia. A metro area that size should be able to support 120 home games a season split between two ball parks. The 2021 schedule calls for only 93 games

    • There’s an usage restriction on Tianmu stadium. Because it is technically a community ball park, they can only host professional games during the weekends.

      Maybe we will see the number of games in Taipei increase to 100-110 range when the Taipei Dome is ready.

      • When will Taipei Dome be ready? If it is a success, that might be the time to think about team six.

        I think if CPBL does eventually expand to six teams, the league should expand playoffs to as many as four teams, depending on who finishes 1st and 2nd each half. Fans love more post season games.

        • Right now, the Taipei Dome is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2021. There’s rumour from a few years ago, maybe SoftBank will partner up with CTBC financial’s subsidiary Taiwan Life to purchase 60% of the share of the Dome.

          As for the 6th team, the new commissioner just need to find a conglomerate that is willing to lose between 3.3 to 6.5 million USD a year running a baseball team.

          CPBL team’s parent company generally treat this “annual loss” as advertising expense.

          The biggest problem right now is to how to “sell” this running a CPBL team idea to potential expansion team owners.

          The new commissioner (who is the deputy speaker of the parliament) wanted to amend this Sports development act which could potentially make it easier to attract businesses to support the sports industry in general.

          I will be putting up a seperate blog post about it in the next few days.

          And playoff structure, I think will probably stick with 3. But I can see they might add a wild card round.

  2. The way I would do a play-off structure with six teams would be to have a team that wins both halves get a first round bye and five of seven games in Taiwan Series. If same team finishes second both haves, no first round series. If team finishes first and second in the two halves, the team gets first round bye but no home field advantage.

    In most seasons there would be at least one first round series unless two teams dominate both halves. In some seasons there could be two first round series if no team can finish in top two both haves. The uncertainty of the post season series would add to the excitement.

  3. Corporate ownership of Asian major league teams means teams are not as profitable as MLB teams, which cannot be owned by corporations. MLB teams sell everything to highest bidder – naming rights, advertisements and concessions.

    That said, some Asian teams are enormously profitable and simply lie about how money they are making. You cannot tell the Yomiuri Giants, Hanson Tigers, SoftBank Hawks and Doosa Bears are not profitable in their own right, particularly given the collusion on player salaries taking place in NPB and KBO.

    • I don’t know much about the NPB, but from my understanding in the KBO only the Doosan Bears and the LG Twins are profitable on their own without additional support from its parent company.

      It’s quite interesting seeing how the Doosan Bears baseball team is extremely profitable, but their parent company are in bit of a financial problems in the past few years. That’s why this recent sale of the SK Wyverns was a huge surprise, everyone thought maybe Doosan will be selling their team.

      Apparently the rest of the KBO teams are all losing money every year. I think I read that somewhere a while ago, each team were losing between 10 to 15 million USD a year.

      But just like Taiwanese team’s parent company, the KBO team owners treat the loss as an acceptable loss. It’s a drop in the bucket for them and they generally can make that loss back in other area.

      • Free agency in NPB came about mainly because Yomiuri wanted to be able to sign away their competitors’ best veteran players. Hanshin often leads NPB in season attendance but they haven’t been as good as Yomiuri or SoftBank at using their revenues to build a consistent winner.

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