CPBL Foreign Players Updates Volume #240
Fubon Guardians News: José Valdez
José Valdez has been on thin ice in the past few weeks. The Guardians manager had hinted to the media that the team is very likely to let him go at the end of July.
On July 28, it finally happened, the Fubon Guardians released José Valdez. According to the team’s press release, Valdez has left Taiwan, and the team wish him all the best for his future career.
The 32-year-old Dominican right-hander finished his 2022 CPBL season with a 4.17 ERA and 1.43 WHIP over 49.2 innings.
The Guardians currently have Mike Loree, Joe Van Meter, Enderson Franco and Tanner Anderson as their foreign players.
Further Readings
Foreign players come and goes, therefore we compiled a foreign players tracker to keep track of all the foreign players signing for the 2022 CPBL season.
One thing I noticed today when I looked at CPBL’s website at work, where the work computer has google translate, is that a lot of players, and in particular foreign players, appear to great nicknames that aren’t much referenced in the English language press. Although I have some questions about the accuracy of google’s translations, Dylan Covey appears to be nicknamed Berserker, and Drew Gagnon appears to be nicknamed Steel Dragon. Bradin Hagens appears to be known to CPBL fans as “Bold,” and Lin Li appears to known as “Bristling,” assumably as in bristling with muscles, since he hits with power. Ryan Bollinger is “Lord Baron,” and Shawn Morimando was “Like Magic.”
Baseball nicknames are great, and we don’t get many of them in MLB anymore, like they did a few generations ago, when just about every successful player had a nickname. Glad to see the CPBL still loves great nicknames.
Oh yeah, it is like a CPBL tradition to do word play with the translated names. Generally for the purpose of making foreign players’ names sound better, I guess almost like wrestling stage name.
Let’s use Ryan Bollinger as an example. The translated name sounds like “Ba-lin-jur” in Mandarin. So they used the words that that mean “Duke of Dominance” for Bollinger.
It’s the same thing with Drew Gagnon, the Mandarin word for “Steel Dragon” sounds identical to “Gagnon”.
For Shawn Morimando. The Mandarin translated name is “Shun Mo Li” a combo name of his first and family name, which sounds like “Elephant Magic”, it make sense too because he plays for a team with an elephant mascot.