A sad day for baseball fans in Taiwan:

Professional baseball in Taiwan was hit by a new scandal following a police crackdown the night before on a criminal ring in which 10 people were arrested on fraud and gambling charges.

Among those arrested were La New Bears player Chen Chao-ying and Tsai Sheng-feng, a coach for the farm team of the Macoto Cobras. Both confessed to having “made a mistake” by playing a role in the gambling fraud scheme. Tsai, 42, was fired by his team yesterday.

The scheme was devised by Li Chuan-lin, a local gangster, who together with six other gangsters and bookies was arrested in central Taiwan on charges of blackmailing and terrorizing baseball coaches and players, and of organizing illegal gambling.

This is the 2nd time that professional baseball has been hit by a major match-rigging scandal – the previous time was back in 1996. The fallout from that scandal all but destroyed the league for several years (many teams folded, and those that survived played in front of tiny crowds), and it’s only in the last few years that support has returned to former levels. Whether there will be a similar reaction this time remains to be seen.

It seems this is the culmination of a years work by the police – they were able to document over a season the not-so-subtle ways that games were fixed:

“The crimes committed by the gangsters are obvious. Films provided by CPBL showed some gangsters shouting at players in the games asking them to play as directed,” police officer Chi Ming-mo, director of the CIB’s anti-crime center in central Taiwan, told reporters.

Corruption and Gambling

This is another high profile example of the corruption that has been endemic in Taiwan over the last few decades – although recent governments have made anti-corruption drives a priority, there has been painfully slow progress. That we seem to be in almost exactly the same situation as we were nearly 10 years ago with corruption in baseball is an uncomfortable reflection on corruption in the rest of society.

Apart from the match-fixing, it’s worth noting that gambling is illegal in Taiwan. Of course this doesn’t mean that it isn’t widespread – the police estimate that this match-fixing ring made about NT$100 million over one year which shows it was quite a lucrative venture. The fact that gambling is illegal obviously has little effect on the enthusiasm with which people gamble – but it does have an effect on how the bookmakers operate, in particular their strong links with organised crime.

Last year, when President Chen Shui-bian was shot, just about the only believable conspiracy theory that came forward was that it was an illegal gambling syndicate who organised the whole thing to profit from the bets already placed on the election outcome. Although this was later found to be false (unsurprisingly, it turned out to be a lone disillusioned nutter who blamed CSB for losing his job who shot him), it is indicative of the power of the gambling gangs that many believed they were capable of something like that.

There must now be a very strong case for legalising gambling in Taiwan. It wouldn’t cut the links that gangsters have with gambling, but it should weaken those links, and would stop criminalising the millions of people who will gamble anyway.