BASEBALL/More seats for Yomiuri Giants exhibition games to go on sale

Taipei, Jan. 15 (CNA) More seats for two exhibition games the Yomiuri Giants will play in Taiwan in early March will be put on sale next week, virtually guaranteeing that one of the contests will set an all-time attendance record for a baseball game in Taiwan.

The exhibition series held to celebrate the Giants' 90th anniversary will be played in early March in the Taipei Dome, which has a seating capacity for baseball of about 40,000.

Taipei and the facility's management have been slowly breaking in the indoor stadium, which opened in November, to see how smoothly crowds enter and exit the stadium and test the capacity of peripheral transportation systems.

They started by allowing in 13,000 fans at an exhibition game in November and then up to 21,000 fans for the Asian Baseball Championship in December.

For the Giants' exhibition games against the CTBC Brothers on March 2 and the Rakuten Monkeys on March 3 of Taiwan's Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL), 26,000 seats went on sale on Dec. 12.

The organizer of the event, udnFunLife, said in a statement Monday that another 4,000-plus seats combined for the two games, priced at NT$1,180 (US$37.77) each, will go on sale on Jan. 22, potentially bringing attendance for each game to 28,000.

That would shatter the previous record for attendance at a baseball game in Taiwan, set in 2001 when 25,000 fans packed into Chengching Lake Baseball Stadium in Kaohsiung for a 2001 World Cup game between Taiwan and the United States.

The March games will feature the major league roster of the Giants, the oldest franchise among the 12 Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) teams, team official Tsukasa Imamura promised during a press conference in December 2023.

Among those expected to play are Kazuma Okamoto, a three-time home run leader in the NPB Central League over the past four seasons, all-star shortstop Hayato Sakamoto and 24-year-old closer Taisei Ota, the 2022 Central League Rookie of the Year winner.

Of the original 26,000 seats that originally went on sale for the games, fewer than 100 tickets for the game on March 2 are left, based on the offerings left on the ticketing website.