CPBL secretary-general 馮勝賢 (Feng Sheng-Xian) has been a busy man lately. After his recent Europe trip where he met the officials from the WBSC. Feng is now in the USA representing CPBL at the MLB All-Star weekend.
During his visit, Feng met up with several MLB executives including Kim Ng (VP of Baseball Operations), Dan Harlem (Chief Legal Officer) & Pat Courtney (Chief Communications Officer) to discuss the possibility of further interactions between the two leagues.
Further interactions between CPBL & MLB
- Exchange programs for the CPBL coaches to the MiLB system.
- Having coaches/ technical staff from the MLB system to be part of Taiwan’s national team in future tier one international tournament (WBC, Premier 12 & Olympics).
- Update on CPBL / MLB protocol agreement.
Keep trying. The CPBL is a decent pro league, but it doesn’t have the chops to compel MLB to give it anything of value for its talent. The top CPBL talent is good enough to move up to the KBO or NPB (with some pay-out to the CPBL team that developed the ballplayer), but MLB signs its Taiwanese talent at 18 when CPBL can’t (and doesn’t have the leverage to demand) compensation. The KBO and NPB place significant restrictions on 18 year old South Korean and Japanese players who sign with MLB organizations (they are barred from playing in the KBO or NPB immediately if they wash out of the MLB system), CPBL teams don’t have the attendance and revenue streams necessary to bar top talent from playing in the Taiwanese league. The CPBL needs all the top talent it can get.
Yep, exactly that. What CPBL need to focus right now is retaining the young amateur talent. Obviously they can’t compete with mega contract (Over 500K USD) But perhaps start focusing retaining players that might get signed out of Taiwan for 200 to 300K USD is a good place to start.
League is slowly making progress towards the right direction in my opinion. With several of improvement to the league’s overall structure and policy. The last few seasons we starting to see a lot more amateur positional players that are willing to stay in Taiwan rather than going oversea. Now they just need to do the same with pitchers.
I guess the concept is to make them see “a future” playing in Taiwan.