6:29 AM, Brooklyn, New York.

Awake, I lie in bed. Soon, through a series of shrill pings, my phone will announce to me that it is time. Until then I remain motionless. Patiently waiting.

Suddenly, a familiar pattern of vibrations has me sitting upright. Not what I was expecting. I leap from my bed and with the help of a single powerful step, soar clear across the room, colliding gracefully with my dresser. Atop, next to a stack of KN95 face masks, my cell phone beams brightly. The message begins:

“I found it.”

“He’s early” I think to myself. I am glad. Some mornings we don’t find it until it’s almost too late. Some mornings we don’t find it at all.

Without thinking, I have already copied and emailed the rest of his text to myself. The next part is a blur: Kitchen. Coffee. Laptop. Cable. Screen. Chair. Now I am in place. I open the message I emailed to myself moments before. I click twice on the link and new screen begins to load.

This is it. It is time to watch Taiwanese baseball.

For the past week, my friend Adam Iskounen and I have been waking up early before work to watch and text back and forth about the only active baseball league right now: the CPBL. By now most baseball fans are at least aware that baseball has started in Taiwan, probably because of the uncharacteristic bench clearing incident that took place on Sunday, April 19 between the Fubon Guardians and Rakuten Monkeys; the videos of which have since gone viral.

Although the acronym stands for “Chinese Professional Baseball League,” the CPBL is based entirely in the island state of Taiwan with no teams from Mainland China as the name might suggest. Because of the time difference, these games usually start at 6:35 AM for us on the East Coast and we can almost always find a live stream of the games online, often with English commentary.

You may be wondering why Taiwan is allowing its baseball season to take place amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to very aggressive action taken by its government as early as January of this year, Taiwan has had fewer than 400 confirmed cases as of April 14th. That’s less than .00002% of the island’s population of over 23 million. Despite this success however, the games are played in empty stadiums to avoid large gatherings of people and the obvious potential for outbreak. Some teams have taken to filling their stadiums with manikins, robot-fans, and other substitutes for live spectators. The CPBL has even created a temporary logo which includes a masked player washing his hands for this year’s season.

Anyone who would like to start watching CPBL games can usually find an English language broadcast on Eleven Sports Taiwan’s Twitter page (@ElevenSportsTW) or can search the internet using “CPBL Live Stream”. On the East Coast, watching these games means getting up early. Baseball fans on the West Coast on the other hand, will have to stay up late or wake up in the middle of the night to catch a game at around 3:35 AM.

打球 … (Play Ball!)

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