Taipei, March 3 (CNA) Taiwan’s top hitter Chen Chin-feng withdrew from the national baseball team Monday with a back injury, a devastating blow to an already weakened squad just four days before the start of the final Olympic qualifying tournament.
Chen, Taiwan's first player to reach the U.S. major leagues and seen as its most talented hitter in the last decade, was told by doctors at National Cheng Kung University Hospital in the southern city of Tainan that he would have to sit out the tournament.
Chen advised manager Hung Yi-chung Sunday that he would have to be left off the roster with a recurring back injury. But with Hung having trouble finding somebody to replace Chen as designated hitter in the lineup's cleanup spot, the former Los Angeles Dodger had hoped for a reprieve from doctors at the Tainan hospital Monday.
The final 2008 Olympic qualifying tournament will be played in Taichung and Douliou in Yunlin County from March 7-14, with the top three of the eight participating teams advancing to the Beijing Games.
The tourney will be Taiwan’s last hope of making the eight-team field in Beijing after it failed to win an automatic slot in the Asian Baseball Championships last December.
The 30-year-old slugger was the latest star to drop out of the national squad. Pitchers Tsao Chin-hui, Keng Po-hsuan, Lin En-yu and Hsu Ming-chieh all decided to concentrate on their professional careers overseas, while Taiwan's best left-handed hitter, Hsieh Chia-hsien has also been lost to injury.
The loss of Chen, however, could torpedo Taiwan's chances against any team with decent pitching, as he has been consistently productive for his club team, the La New Bears, or the national team in big international competitions.
Chen hit the first-ever grand slam in the inaugural 2006 Asian Series, a tournament featuring the best club teams from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and a representative squad from China.
He drove in eight runs and hit.407 at the 2004 Athens Olympics and hit.500 at the 2003 Asian Championships.
His most memorable performance came in the bronze medal game of the 2001 Baseball World Cup against Japan, when his two home runs not only won the game for Taiwan, but also may have sparked the resurgence of Taiwanese baseball after game-fixing scandals had dimmed interest in previous years.
Replacing Chen won't be an easy task, Hung told the media, with Hsieh unavailable. Shortstop Lin Chi-sheng, the hero in Taiwan's Asian Games gold medal victory in December 2006, has also pulled a thigh muscle and his status for the tournament remains uncertain.
With the injuries and withdrawals, Taiwan's once promising hopes for an Olympic berth will now rest primarily on a group of amateurs untested in international competition, not exactly a confidence-building thought for Hung and the team's fans.