Taiwan players find laundry service, ending baseball teams' 'laundry war'
Taiwan national team player Wang Yen-cheng, who plays for the KBO League's Hanwha Eagles, stretches after the game against Korea in the first round of Group B at the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games at Okazaki Central Park Baseball Stadium in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, Monday. Yonhap
The “laundry war” that broke out among baseball teams competing at the 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games appears to be coming to an end, with each national team finding its own solution.
Taiwan’s China Times reported on Wednesday that the Chinese Taipei Baseball Association had finally found an outside laundry service, allowing the Taiwan baseball team to have its uniforms washed at its own expense. “Players no longer have to do their laundry themselves in the early hours of the morning,” the report said.
The report added that Korea, Japan and China had also each contracted separate laundry services, predicting that scenes of players from different countries lining up in front of the hotel’s coin-operated washing machines would soon become a thing of the past.
The baseball competition has been plagued by various operational problems involving accommodations, transportation and training facilities. Among them, a lack of adequate laundry services has caused difficulties for teams from several countries.
According to an official with the Korean baseball team, all teams competing in baseball are staying at the same hotel in Nagoya. Although the hotel provides laundry services, it takes several days for laundry to be returned.
Baseball players, however, need to wash their uniforms every day because they become soiled during practices and games. The laundry service currently provided by the organizing committee is therefore insufficient to meet the teams’ needs, according to the official.
As a result, players from different countries have been using the limited number of coin-operated washing machines at the hotel themselves, leading to awkward situations, including competition to secure the machines.
Chinese Taipei captain Chen Min-tzu said on Tuesday that he returned to the hotel late after a game the previous night and had to do his own laundry using one of the hotel’s coin-operated machines.
“I finished my laundry at around 3 or 4 a.m., but I had to get up around 6 or 7 a.m. for a daytime game,” he said.
In the end, the teams have been searching for outside laundry services and paying for them out of their own pockets to have their uniforms washed.
The Korean team has also hired an outside company through the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) to handle its laundry.
“We found a company and resolved the issue early on,” a KBO official said on Wednesday, the day the laundry issue came to light.
This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.