Eleven Sports Taiwan streamed empty-stadium CPBL games in English as MLB paused

Taiwan's Chinese Professional Baseball League had spent decades overshadowed by Japan's and Korea's leagues, hurt further by 1990s–2000s game-fixing scandals and chronic underinvestment; its play-by-play announcer had once been asked to move from TV to radio just to save the league money. When the pandemic reached Taiwan, the CPBL kept playing — in empty stadiums, with cardboard fan cutouts and a drum-playing robot — because the island had held Covid-19 to a handful of cases.

In mid-April 2020, once it was clear Covid-19 would delay Major League Baseball's season, broadcaster Eleven Sports Taiwan decided to chase the global audience left starved of live sports. It tapped commentator Richard Wang to call CPBL games in English on just a few days' notice; he prepared by riding around Taipei listening to old MLB broadcasts through his helmet.

The bet paid off immediately: Wang's first five English broadcasts drew more than 5 million combined views on Twitter, from viewers well beyond homesick American fans, including audiences in Singapore and Japan. Eleven Sports Taiwan's managing director, Simone Kang, said that without the decision to broadcast in English on Twitter, 'the games would still be unknown to the rest of the world.'

The first five English-commentated games drew over 5 million combined Twitter views from fans in the U.S., Singapore, and Japan, and CPBL blog traffic rose tenfold.

MLB's pandemic delay created a rare vacuum in global live sports that Eleven Sports Taiwan moved fast to fill.

Taiwan's early Covid-19 containment meant the CPBL was one of the only leagues on Earth still playing in-person games.

Commentating in English, not just Mandarin, made the product legible to the international audience the gap had created.

Twitter's livestream distribution let the broadcast reach viewers directly without needing a licensing deal with a foreign network.

A gap left by bigger, paused rivals can be a window for a niche, overlooked league to win a global audience — if someone commits to covering it in that audience's language, fast.

Wang went on to call close to 100 games that season for the international feed. Blogger Rob Liu, the English-language authority on the league, said viewership was running at roughly 700,000 views per game on Twitter, versus about 6,000 average in-stadium attendance the prior year, and that traffic to his CPBL Stats site was up tenfold. Liu said he was unsure the surge would convert into a lasting global fan base, but saw it as validation for players used to being overlooked.