There have been no reported cases of game-fixing since 2009, he said.
Most players involved confessed to taking part in the scheme and avoided jail by paying fines equal to the bribes they took.
They were banished from professional baseball and, having trained most of their lives to become ballplayers, they have had trouble finding work, the shame of being implicated sending them into hiding.
But two players, Tsai and Chen, agreed to speak to The New York Times about how they have sought to redeem themselves.
They have taken different paths.
Tsai returned to rural Nantou County. Because of his banishment, he cannot wear a baseball uniform or coach a team, so he instead looks for money to keep his program afloat and to build a new stadium. He bunks with his coaches and players in a dingy dormitory where the communal dining area is next to a homemade indoor batting cage.
Tsai had spent years fighting the charges that he helped throw four games. After his initial two-year jail sentence was reduced to six months, he agreed to pay a fine of about $100,000 to settle the case. His probation, which ended in August, required that he report daily to a police station, a humiliation he found hard to do after such an illustrious career.
Friends offered him jobs at a university and a technology company, where he could have earned two to three times more than the roughly $1,000 a month he makes now. Instead, he returned to central Taiwan, where he grew up, to work with children and get back to basics.
“Most players would not be willing to do what I do now, teaching baseball in a school, because it’s a lot of work and not much money,” he said. “Even though I got a six-month sentence, I’m still pretty much a free soul.”
Credit
Sean Marc Lee for The New York Times
Chen lives a flashier life in Taipei. He runs a restaurant that serves aboriginal food like fried crickets, mountain boar and beetle nut flowers.
Thanks to his pop star wife, he is a minor television celebrity. He also produces a rice snack with a friend and donates the proceeds to baseball programs in regions where poor aboriginal children live. He tutors high school players.
But in Taiwan, where baseball is almost a national religion, neither man will regain the stature he commanded as a professional ballplayer. Each continues to proclaim his innocence, but the game-fixing scandal has been a hard stain to erase.
“I left baseball because of the scandals, and that’s not something that I can change,” Chen said at his restaurant, La Fung, or the Guest. “But I can change myself, set goals for myself. I have a wife and kids to take care of. I need to maintain a positive attitude.”
The Arrests
The case that was their undoing was discovered almost by accident.
A prosecutor in Taipei, Wang Cheng-hao, received an anonymous tip after the 2008 season that hundreds of thousands of dollars were being wagered on baseball games, and the Windshield Wiper was winning most of the time.
Gambling is not a crime, but fixing games is.
Wang and investigators looked at the Windshield Wiper’s bank and phone records and discovered a network of middlemen that ultimately led them to the players.
The Windshield Wiper, who was from southern Taiwan and in his late 30s at the time, was one of the biggest gamblers in the country.
He was subtler than most gangsters. Instead of laundering money through businesses that served as fronts, he had dummy accounts set up in his friends’ names. He had no prior convictions for gambling.
He was a baseball fan, though, and he liked to hang around ballparks, where he sat near the dugout and chatted up players, some of whom joined him for dinner. He also befriended former players living in southern Taiwan, whom he paid to recruit active players.
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Sean Marc Lee for The New York Times
Wang collected evidence through the 2009 season to determine which players were involved. He made arrests when the season was over.
“If we arrested him during the season, it would have affected the games, but if we didn’t stop him after the season, it could affect more games,” Wang said in his office in suburban Taipei.
According to court documents, one middleman, Chuang Hung-liang, dealt specifically with star players, who at times received money in shoe boxes. Some players were motivated to take bribes because they were upset with their low salaries; others felt threatened.
After his arrest, the Windshield Wiper initially denied everything, but ultimately named about 40 people. The investigation reached back four seasons, to 2006. Some of the appeals, including Tsai’s, dragged into 2014.
A Ticket Out
Like other players from rural Taiwan, Tsai and Chen saw baseball as their ticket out of poverty.
Tsai began playing in the streets with friends with whatever equipment they could find. When he was 10, he was recruited to attend a private school with a well-known team. In 1988, Tsai was good enough to travel to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa., where his team won the title by beating the team from Pearl City, Hawaii.
When the boys returned home, they were paraded through the streets. The trip was eye-opening for the son of a bus driver and a hairdresser who rarely saw him play.
“Country folks don’t really watch baseball games,” Tsai said over noodles at a restaurant near his school. “They have loads of things to do; they’re very busy.”
Given his modest means, playing baseball was a necessity. He turned pro in 1997 and joined the Mercuries Tigers. When the club folded after the 1999 season, Tsai joined the Brother Elephants. He had a career year in 2002, hitting 21 home runs and batting .294. He played in the 2004 Olympics, where Taiwan finished fifth.
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Eric Gay/Associated Press
“By the time I became a pro, I wouldn’t say I was happy about this,” said Tsai, rail thin and all business. “Most of the players come from poorer families, so the only thing they thought about was playing well so they would have a bargaining chip to get more money to help their families. It was a job.”
Though salaries in the Taiwanese league have increased in recent years, they are nothing like what players in Major League Baseball earn, and they are barely more than what a manager at a white-collar company might bring in.
Because they are celebrities, they are often invited to bars and restaurants, where their tabs are covered.
“Taiwanese players like to drink, and drinking is a way to relax, but once they start going out with people, that creates a lot of trouble because people know who you are and will want a lot of things from you,” he said. “Drinking would make you do stupid things.”
Prosecutors accused Tsai of throwing four games years after he stopped playing.
He was sentenced in 2011 to two years in jail and ordered to pay a fine. On appeal, the sentence was reduced to a six-month jail term, which he avoided by paying a smaller fine.
He said that in the first few years after he left baseball, at least five groups of gangsters tried to get him to help them fix games. Some, he said, offered as much as $300,000. He refused.
“If I was willing to do it, I could have done it ages ago, rather than teaching kids baseball and getting 30,000 dollars a month,” he said, referring to New Taiwan dollars. At current rates, that would be about $950 a month.
Tsai has three young children, but his days are spent with his players, with potential donors and at the construction site where a new county stadium is being built. He said he gets up at 6 a.m. and finishes work at midnight.
Budgets are tight, so broken bats and worn baseballs are patched up with tape.
He said he tells his students that pro ballplayers can earn a lot of money, but also spend a lot of it. Better, he said, to live modestly and humbly.
