CPBL 2026 (M)

The CPBL was founded on 23 October 1989 with four teams and began play in 1990. What followed looks like no other professional league's history: a run of match-fixing scandals that carried off half the competition.

The list is long and has names attached. The Black Tigers case in 1995 and the Black Eagles case in 1997 sank attendances and finished off the China Times Eagles, dissolved after that season. Two years later the Wei Chuan Dragons and the Mercuries Tigers disappeared. And just when it seemed over, another wave came between 2005 and 2009: the Dmedia T-REX were expelled from the league and the Chinatrust Whales closed in 2008.

In between there was a merger that saved it: after 2002 the Taiwan Major League agreed to fold in, its four teams reorganised into two. Today the honour roll is led by the Chinatrust Brothers and the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions, tied on ten titles each.

The 2025 Taiwan Series was settled in Game 5, played on 27 October in Taichung, and not in the regulation nine innings. It reached the eleventh level, and there the veteran catcher Lin Hung-Yu hit a two-run home run that put the Rakuten Monkeys ahead for good.

That title carried a nuance that matters in Taiwan: it was the Monkeys' first since Rakuten took over the club. The franchise had spent years changing owners and names, and this was the first time it had won under the current one.

The Chinatrust Brothers fell on the other side, arriving as 2024 champions and finishing two runs short of back-to-back titles. Chin Cheng of the Monkeys and Jesús Vargas of the Brothers were named the series' outstanding players.

The league is back to six teams, something that had not happened since 2008. The sixth are the TSG Hawks, of the Taiwan Steel Group, who debuted in 2024 and restored to the competition a size the scandals had taken from it.

And there is a return with even more symbolic weight: the Wei Chuan Dragons, one of the clubs that vanished in 1999 in the middle of the collapse, are on the grid again. A league that lost four franchises to corruption has got one of them back and added another.

The season opens on 28 March, and the fixture computer showed no great imagination, nor did it need to: Rakuten Monkeys against Chinatrust Brothers, an exact rerun of October's final, on day one. In the background a seventh team is being discussed — the chairman of TS Financial Holding has acknowledged the idea has been talked about internally — but for now it goes no further than conversation.

The Taiwanese calendar splits down the middle and each half is an independent championship. A first half-season is played with its own table and its own winner, the scoreboard is reset, and the second is played the same way. Win either one and you are in the postseason, regardless of what you did in the other.

That completely changes what a bad start is worth. A team that sinks in April does not drag it around: in June it begins again with the same chances as everyone else, and the league guarantees no club is written off by midsummer. In a competition of only six teams, where the same opponents come round up to twenty times, that second chance is what stops the season dying in the heat.

The remaining places go by wild card, on the best overall record. And there is a neat detail: if one team wins both halves, it does not take two places — another wild card is released instead, so the final bracket always has somebody to put in front of them.