Min-Ching Lo

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Min-Ching Lo (羅敏卿)

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Biographical Information[edit]

Min-Ching Lo played 15 years in the Chinese Professional Baseball League, winning the MVP award once. He led his league three times in OBP, twice in slugging and once in batting average. He spent 23 career games at first base, being used almost exclusively as a designated hitter throughout.

Lo was with Taiwan for the 1984 World Junior Championship. He was slated to play for them in the 1989 Intercontinental Cup, but was removed from the team right before the event due to disobedience of manager Lai-Fa Lee; it would be 12 years before he was allowed on the Taiwan national team.

When the CPBL formed in 1990, Lo played for the Uni-President Lions. He hit .259/.359/.356. In 1991, he batted .275/.351/.397. He excelled in the 1991 Taiwan Series, hitting .445 with two homers and 11 RBI to win Taiwan Series MVP honors. Lo improved to .315/.381/.476 in 1992 and led with 104 hits; he was also 6th in slugging, 7th in OBP and tied Francisco Laureano for second in average behind only Juan Castillo.

Min-Ching produced at a .293/.393/.471 rate in 1993. He hit the 800th homer in CPBL annals, taking Ping-Yang Huang deep. He was second in OBP behind Laureano. In 1994, Lo hit .342/.390/.521, placing 4th in OBP, 10th in slugging and 4th in average. The Hualien County native's batting line in 1995 was .301/.383/.447. He was 8th in OBP and second to Cheng-Hsien Chen with 28 doubles.

Lo hit .352/.445/.549 for the 1996 Lions, setting a career high in OPS and RBI (74). He was third in the league in average, 8th in slugging and led in OBP (.008 ahead of Luis Iglesias). Min-Ching batted .336/.433/.514 in 1997 with a career-high 13 home runs. He was third in OBP (behind Boi Rodrigues and Ted Wood), 7th in slugging and 4th in average (leading all native-born Taiwanese players). In 1998, the veteran batsmen hit .276/.397/.384 in an off-year. He tied for 7th in OBP. Also that year, he became the first player to have 400 career RBI in the CPBL.

In his 10th season, he batted .259/.347/.398. With the 2000 Lions, he rebounded to .319/.434/.535. He led in OBP for the second time (.002 over Chung-Yi Huang) and in slugging (.014 over Lien-Hung Chen) while losing the batting title to Lien-Hung Chen by .035. He was presumably a major MVP candidate but the award went to pitcher Mark Kiefer instead. Lo did win the Taiwan Series MVP for the second time, the first player ever to do that (Luther Hackman was the second, doing so in 2008 and 2009), with a record six homers to go with 11 RBI to power his club to the 2000 Taiwan Series title. His nine career Taiwan Series home runs were a record until Chih-Sheng Lin passed him in 2015. For the first time, a Best Ten award was given out as the CPBL's top DH and Lo took the honor.

Lo hit .357/.441/.500 in 2001, easily leading in average (.045 over Sung-Hsien Yang), tied Chin-Yong Wang for third in RBI (50), led in OBP (.046 over Lien-Hung Chen) and led in slugging (.014 over Chung-Chiu Lin). He was again named best DH in the circuit and took home the CPBL MVP award. Previously, pitchers had won every CPBL MVP except for 1998, when foreigner Jay Kirkpatrick won; Lo was thus the first native-born batter to win it. Also that year, on June 13, he became the first CPBL player to tally 1,000 career hits, doing so in his 3,244th at-bat; it would be 9 years until another player (Cheng-Min Peng) got 1,000 in fewer at-bats. He finally made it to Taiwan's national team in the 2001 Baseball World Cup, going 2 for 9 with three walks while backing up Chuan-Chia Wang at DH.

Lo continued to make history. On August 18, 2002, he became the 4th CPBL player to hit 100 career homers, taking Osvaldo Martínez yard. He only batted .263/.354/.342 on the year, though, for his lowest OPS to that point. In '03, he hit .366/.472/.503 in a resurgent year. Had he qualified, he would have been 4th in slugging, second to Cheng-Min Peng in OBP and second to Cheng-Min Peng in average. He lost Best Ten honors to Han-Chou Tseng.

Lo batted .291/.367/.448 in 2004and won his third Best Ten selection at DH; that mark stood until Chin-Feng Chen broke it from 2006-2009; Lo likely would have won several times in the 1990s had the award been given out then. After 15 years with the Lions, Lo left for the Macoto Cobras in 2005 - in his last year, he hit .214/.315/.313. After his playing career ended, Lo coached for the Lions in 2006 and managed their farm club starting from 2007 to 2010.

Overall, Lo had batted .305/.395/.455 in his CPBL career, with 1,258 hits, 265 doubles and 111 home runs. As of 2023, Lo was 18th in batting (between Tai-Shan Chang and Yung-Chi Chen), 9th in RBI (between Chih-Hao Chang and Wu-Hsiung Pan), 12th in hits (between Sheng-Wei Wang and Chuan-Chia Wang), 8th in doubles (between Kuo-Ching Kao and Chung-Yi Huang), 21th in homers (between Lien-Hung Chen and Fu-Hao Liu) and 6th in walks (tied with Pan).

Sources[edit]

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