A League That Rents Its Aces
Rotations in Taiwan are built around foreign pitchers on short-term contracts
What is the purpose of a professional baseball league? In the U.S. and Canada, with MLB, this may seem very obvious:
To bring top baseball talent in front of paying fans, and
To grow a talent pipeline, so that talent in #1 can continue.
But MLB holds a unique status of representing baseball’s best globally. Other leagues around the world, as much as they try, do not come close to achieving the same level of individual talent.
In Taiwan, as in other Asian countries, the top-tier league has a complicated mandate. The corollaries to #1-2, therefore, are:
To bring top domestic baseball talent in front of paying fans, and
To grow a domestic talent pipeline, so that #3 can continue.
In addition, especially in recent years, there is also a collective desire to use the professional league to help develop a national team that is competitive. Thus, we have the foreign player quota.
Foreign player quota, a history
Without a quota on foreign players, the Taiwanese league would likely be flooded with foreign players, based on simple population and economic differentials. There are bigger pools of baseball talent abroad, including many who are willing to play for less.
The interesting thing is that, by prioritizing or implementing #4, the league is compromising #1 in theory, and vice versa. The decision to exchange roster spots (and bigger contracts) for foreign talent has therefore been a balancing act.
In the early 1990s, the CPBL’s foreign player quota was five per team, and three on the field at a time. In 1998, the rival upstart Taiwan Major League (TML) diluted the pool of players, causing the CPBL to institute a much higher quota of up to 12 foreign players, almost half of the 25-man roster. Just two years later, the diluted fan base forced the CPBL to cut costs and lower the quota down to two.1
When the two leagues merged in 2003, the newly combined CPBL raised the quota to three players, which was the longest-standing rule that lasted until 2020. Since then, the quota has stayed at four.
Rotations built on rentals
The incentive structure has created a league that depends heavily on foreign starting pitchers. Looking at just ERA: Over the past three seasons including 2026 to date, just three domestic pitchers, or 11% of the 28 qualified pitchers in total, occupy the leaderboard.2 Only two domestic pitchers made the top 10 in wins. According to analytics site Rebas, the trend holds for advanced stats like win probability added (WPA). This phenomenon is unique to the CPBL, and the KBO and NPB, with similar quotas, do not have such an outsized foreign dominance.
Most import contracts run a single season (with three- or four-month guarantees), with teams cutting and replacing underperforming pitchers mid-year, rather than working through a slump. The calculus is analogous to a trade-deadline rental, applied to the entire foreign pitching class. A foreign player only stops counting against the quota after nine full seasons on a roster, a threshold that has only been cleared by Mike Loree and Bryan Woodall.
There aren’t that many spots in the rotation to begin with, and most teams fill them with foreign starters. It isn’t unusual to have all-foreign starting pitcher matchups on any given day, and foreign pitchers soak up the majority of innings pitched throughout the season.
Taiwan’s homegrown pitchers have chosen to pursue NPB or MLB. Former MVP Ruei-Yang Gu Lin signed with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in 2024, and Wei Chuan Dragons phenom Jo-Hsi Hsu was posted to the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks. Domestic aces are increasingly seeking careers abroad, and many more young prospects sign with MLB organizations.
The result is a league squeezed from both directions. It imports pitchers to cover for a thin domestic rotation, while its most elite homegrown pitchers are recruited away before they reach their prime.
Should there be a fix?
A market purist might not think there’s anything wrong with the status quo. After all, there are plenty of elite Taiwanese pitchers; they are just mostly playing abroad. They may arguably develop better by facing better, and more international, batters. And foreign pitchers may just be what domestic batters need to develop. A national team can benefit from this setup, and weak domestic pitching might be why teams rely on foreign pitchers, not vice versa.
But team-level brand value is missing from this equation. While each team is incentivized to fill its rotation with foreign starters (to eat more innings, which translate to more wins and less usage on the rest of the pitching staff), there is an opportunity cost beyond the actual contracts (on average about US$500 thousand).3
The value of a franchise pitcher, as opposed to rentals, is at least worth thinking about. Shohei Ohtani reportedly boosted ticket and merchandise sales (setting jersey sale records), allowing the Los Angeles Dodgers to make back the entirety of his US$700 million contract.
That kind of value is a moonshot for any Taiwanese team, and the mechanisms are hardly comparable. But there might be brand value left on the table by deferring a large part of pitching development to MLB or NPB organizations, or their minor league affiliates. A Taiwanese team that successfully develops and keeps a domestic ace can tap into something no import can offer: the loyalty of a fan base rooting for one of their own.
Teams currently value a 33-year-old import with a proven track record over a 23-year-old Taiwanese prospect, perhaps rationally. Whether it’s the right bet long-term is harder to say.
The TML took some market share, but the CPBL was also dealing with one of its first game-fixing scandals at the time. These large differences in league rules were a product of larger competitive dynamics, but they provided a case study of how fans may react to foreign players.
To qualify for ERA leadership, a pitcher must record at least 1.0 innings pitched per scheduled game.
Incidentally, the top nine contracts in 2026 for domestic players are valued or estimated at about US$500 thousand in average annual value.