Mercuries Tigers

The Mercuries Tigers (三商虎) were a professional baseball team belonging to Taiwan's Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) between 1990 and 1999.

History

The Tigers were owned and administered by the local Mercuries Corporation whose then chairman Chen He-dong (陳河東) was a classmate and a close friend of Brother Hotel and Brother Elephants's chairman Hung Teng-sheng (洪騰勝) in the National Taiwan University, and immediately promised to fulfill Hung's wishes to form a Taiwanese professional baseball league in 1988. This team was established accordingly in 1989 and took the now-demolished Taipei Municipal Baseball Stadium as its home throughout its history. Because the Mercuries Corporation itself was inexperienced in running sports clubs, in 1988 and 1989 it was mostly Hung Teng-sheng that built up the Tiger's roster as well as managing most business, with Chen He-dong sponsoring the necessary fund. This team therefore became the only one of the CPBL's founding teams without an amateur history: both Brother Elephants and Wei Chuan Dragons were original amateur teams, while the bulk of Uni-President Lions's players came from Taipower (台電).