The Chinatrust Brothers punched their ticket to the 2026 CPBL Taiwan Series on Tuesday night, scoring twice in the ninth inning to beat the Fubon Guardians 5–4 at Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium. The victory gave the Brothers their fourth first-half title in six seasons and forced the rest of the league to recalculate wild-card math with only six regular-season games left.
Standings snapshot
Taipei’s Rakuten Monkeys and Tainan’s Uni-President Lions enter Wednesday tied for the second postseason berth, each one game behind the Guardians for the top wild-card seed. The Wei Chuan Dragons, last year’s champions, were eliminated from contention after a rain-shortened loss in Kaohsiung, ending a defense that never recovered from early-season pitching injuries.
CPBL commissioner Tsai Chi-chang said the league would stick with its existing three-of-five first-round format despite broadcaster requests for an extra play-in game. Ticket packages for the Taiwan Series in Taipei and Taichung go on sale Friday; scalpers already listed standing-room passes on local marketplaces at triple face value.
Brothers’ bullpen edge
Manager Tsao Chun-yang leaned on closer Huang Wei-chung for a four-out save after starter Wang Po-jung exited with a blister in the seventh. Huang, who logged 38 saves during the regular season, threw 28 pitches in the ninth—a workload the team says is sustainable with two off days before the series opener on September 27.
Offensively, foreign import Tyler Jones drove in three runs, including a opposite-field double that tied the game before pinch hitter Lin Tzu-wei’s sacrifice fly won it. Jones leads the league in OPS against left-handed relief, a split the Lions hope to exploit if they meet the Brothers in the finals.
Fan travel and Golden Week
Golden Week rail discounts helped fill the Taichung outfield: the club announced attendance of 18,742, the stadium’s largest crowd since 2023. Merchandise stands sold out of yellow replica jerseys by the seventh inning, prompting the front office to airlift inventory from its Taipei flagship store.
For bettors and fantasy players, the tighter race revived interest in CPBL’s official stats app, which crashed briefly when live win-probability charts spiked during the ninth. The league said it added server capacity for the final week, mindful that gambling-adjacent apps drive younger viewers even as television ratings stay flat.
Pitching matchups ahead
The Lions will send lefty Chen Wei-yin against the Guardians on Thursday in a game that could decide home-field advantage for the wild-card round. Rakuten counters with a bullpen day after riding starter Ishikawa deep into the eighth on Tuesday, a schedule manager Ishii said was planned around travel to Hsinchu for the weekend finale.
Brothers officials begin roster cuts Friday but are expected to carry an extra reliever given September’s compressed calendar. Medical staff listed Wang as day-to-day; blister protocols in Taiwan’s humid climate often sideline starters for a week even when imaging looks clean, a wrinkle opponents study when setting playoff rotations.
