The Yomiuri Giants, who have switched to manager Shinnosuke Abe (44), will play an exhibition game in Taiwan. The Giants will travel to Taiwan shortly after their spring training in Okinawa ends in early March next year.

Yomiuri will play two games against the Chung-Hsin Brothers and Rakuten Monkeys of the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) on March 2-3, Japanese sports publications such as Sportshochi reported on March 19. The venue will be the Taipei Dome, Taiwan’s first multi-purpose dome stadium, which opened on Dec. 3. The first professional team to play in the Taipei Dome. The Taiwanese side invited Yomiuri, who is well known and popular in his home country.굿모닝토토

Legendary home run king Sadaharu Oh, who along with Shigeo Nagashima led the Yomiuri in their heyday in the 1960s and 70s, is a Taiwanese national. He was born and raised in Tokyo in 1940 to a Chinese father and Japanese mother. He won the Central League home run title for 13 straight years from 1962 to 1974, and the Yomiuri won the Japan Series for nine straight years from 1965 to 1973. Sadaharu Oh holds the Nippon Professional Baseball record with 868 home runs and 2170 RBIs.

In 1990, when the Taiwanese Professional Baseball League was founded, Taiwanese-born Roh Ming-hsueh (呂明賜) was playing for Yomiuri. He made waves when he hit a home run in his first at-bat in the first game of the first team in June 1988. Another Taiwanese-born player, Yang Daigang (陽岱鋼), played for Yomiuri for five years after joining the Nippon Ham Fighters.

Yomiuri prepared for the season in Taichung, Taiwan, in the spring of 1968.

In 2018, Yomiuri’s second team trained in Taiwan, and the third team has been actively interacting. The Yomiuri OB and Taiwan OB, including Sadaharu Oh, played a charity game in Taichung in 2016.

After finishing fourth and missing the postseason for the second year in a row, Yomiuri is looking to rebound by overhauling the team atmosphere. Head coach Tatsunori Hara stepped down, and catching legend Abe took the reins. The team will be at full strength next March when spring training concludes and exhibition games begin. Japanese media reported that Yomiuri’s first-team mainstays will travel to Taiwan.

Yomiuri isn’t the only Japanese professional team to have ties to Taiwan. The Yakult Swallows in 1994, the Seibu Lions in 1998, and the Dai-E Hawks (SoftBank’s predecessor) in 2003 flew to Taiwan after the season. The Chiba Lotte Marines have also consistently traveled to Taiwan.