Nine Cleats, Nine Stories: Inside Under Armour’s Wearable Biographies for Taiwan’s Baseball All-Stars

A red gold breastplate on one shoe, a tiger’s claw mark on another. At this year’s CPBL All-Star Game, the real conversation piece is on the players’ feet

recall

• A Different Kind of Uniform
• Chang Chih-Hao: Armor Built From a Long Comeback
• Huang Tzu-Peng: The Tiger Comes Home
• Chen Tzu-Hao: Sunrise as Leadership
• Yueh Tung-Hua: The Shield at Second
• Lin An-Ko: Blue Water Between Two Islands
• The Rest of the Roster: Wang Po-Hsuan, Wang Nien-Hao, Chang Yu-Chien
• HEATGEAR ELITE and the Full Kit
• Why This Matters Beyond the Diamond

Taipei Dome fills with noise this week as the CPBL gathers its best for the annual All-Star Game, and for the fourth year running, Under Armour has shh staged a second event that unfolds away from the batter’s box. Batting practice draws the cameras and the fan votes decide who takes the field on Sunday, but a smaller ritual has been building alongside it: players lacing up shoes that were never meant to be seen from the stands, only understood by the people who already know their stories.

 

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Working again with Taiwanese custom footwear atelier MFD.System, the brand has produced a run of hand painted cleats for its roster of Team UA athletes, each pair built not around a shared aesthetic but around the specific player wearing it. Nobody involved in the project pretends this is subtle marketing. It is, more plainly, a chance for a shoe to say something a stat line cannot.

There is no house style to this collection, and that is the point. A shield shows up on one shoe because a second baseman has spent a decade being the player nobody worries about. A rocket streaks across another because a rookie’s swing looks like it was launched rather than taken. Claw marks run down a third because a pitcher finally made it back to the city he grew up in. The approach treats each cleat as a small, wearable biography: uniform numbers, hometown skylines, nicknames earned over years, and the odd word stitched or heat pressed into the leather where only the player and anyone close enough to notice will ever read it. Nothing here is generic. Every colorway had to be argued for, then painted by hand, before it ever touched a locker room floor.\

The full rollout covers nine players across the league’s six clubs, spanning starters selected for Sunday’s showcase and everyday regulars who will never suit up for an All-Star Game but still get the same attention to detail. It is, in its own understated way, one of the more personal collaborations in Taiwanese sports right now.

Under Armour showcases its 2026 CPBL All-Star custom cleat collection, with each player receiving a hand-painted design that reflects a personal story, symbol, or career milestone.

chang chih-hao

Few players in the league carry the kind of resume that Chang Chih-Hao does, and fewer still have had to rebuild a career after reconstructive knee surgery the way he has. As the spiritual leader of the CTBC Brothers, Chang has spent recent seasons proving that the years and the operating table did not slow him down, and his cleats lean directly into that story. Metallic armor plating in deep red and gold wraps the shoe, evoking something closer to a breastplate than a baseball cleat, a nod to a player who has had to armor up against doubt as much as against opposing pitchers. The word HUNGER sits along the inner panel, unglamorous and blunt, which is more or less how Chang has talked about his own comeback in interviews over the past two seasons.

What makes the design work is restraint. There is no attempt to soften the imagery into something purely celebratory. The armor motif reads as defensive rather than triumphant, a shoe built for a player who still has something to prove every time he steps into the batter’s box, injury history included. For a veteran who has spent a career being counted on and, more recently, being counted out, that distinction matters more than it might seem from a distance.

huang tzu-peng

Huang Tzu-Peng’s move back to Kaohsiung after signing with the TSG Hawks reads like the kind of storyline a screenwriter would reject for being too neat, and Under Armour built his cleats entirely around that homecoming. Tiger stripes and claw marks run across the shoe in a nod to his nickname, blended with the Hawks’ green so the design still reads as team colors rather than personal branding layered on top of a uniform. HOMECOMING is pressed into the inner side, with his number 69 and English name worked into the exterior panel. For a pitcher who left home to build a career elsewhere and has now returned to throw in front of the crowd that first watched him play, the cleat functions less like footwear and more like a small plaque.

There is a specific kind of pressure that comes with returning to a hometown roster, where every outing is watched by people who remember a player before he was a professional at all. The tiger imagery leans into that pressure rather than away from it, turning Huang’s nickname into something closer to a coat of arms. Local fans watching from the Kaohsiung stands this season are, in effect, watching a homecoming play out one start at a time, and the cleats give that story a physical form.

chen tzu-hao

Where Chang and Huang’s designs lean into hardship, Chen Tzu-Hao’s cleats take a warmer approach. A rising sun motif spreads red and orange gradients across the shoe, a visual built to communicate steadiness rather than struggle. As one of the more experienced hitters in the CPBL and an informal mentor within his clubhouse, Chen’s design carries the word STANDARD along the inner panel, a reference to the example teammates are meant to be able to point to when they need one. It is a quieter kind of tribute than a comeback story, but it fits a player whose value has always been measured in consistency rather than highlight reels.

yueh tung-hua

If there is a single word that describes Yueh Tung-Hua’s reputation around the league, it is reliable, and Under Armour built his cleats to look the part. Metallic yellow, black, and gunmetal grey combine into a shield motif, a literal nod to Yueh’s role as the CPBL’s most dependable defender up the middle. SHIELD is stamped along the inner side of the cleat, a design choice that resists flash in favor of something closer to armor plating, appropriate for a player whose entire game is built on stability rather than spectacle. Yueh’s return to this year’s All-Star roster marks another season in which his glove has spoken louder than his bat, and the cleats reflect exactly that.

lin an-ko

The most quietly emotional design in the entire collection belongs to a player who will not actually be at Taipei Dome this week. Lin An-Ko has spent recent seasons developing in Japan with the Seibu Lions, and his cleats were built to carry a message across that distance rather than to fit a specific game. Deep blue tones dominate the shoe, meant to evoke both the ocean separating him from home and the Lions’ own team color, while a gold silhouette of Taiwan sits alongside the word SUPPORT. The design reads less like a celebration of a moment and more like a letter, a reminder that the fans and teammates he left behind are still watching from across the water. It is the one cleat in the collection built entirely around distance rather than a single game or milestone.

Players who leave the CPBL to develop overseas occupy an odd position back home. They are still claimed as part of the league’s story even while their box scores show up on a different continent’s broadcasts. Lin’s cleat acknowledges that split directly rather than pretending it does not exist, choosing to represent both places at once instead of picking a single team’s colors to lean on. It is a small design decision, but it is also one of the more honest choices in the entire rollout.

roster

Under Armour extended the same level of craft to three players who will not take the field this weekend but remain part of the Team UA roster year round, each outfitted in the brand’s Yard Icon MT cleat rather than the All-Star specific colorway. Wang Po-Hsuan’s design channels the TSG Hawks’ military green into a scene built from outfield grass, foul lines, and bases, an ode to a player whose game has always been built on hustle rather than power, with UNSTOPPABLE stamped along the inner panel.

Wang Nien-Hao, a first time All-Star selection this year, gets a cleat built around explosive contact, with Fubon Guardians blue and silver streaking across the shoe like a rocket breaking atmosphere. DRIVEN is worked into the inner side, a fitting word for a hitter whose swing has become the thing scouts talk about most this season.

Chang Yu-Chien rounds out the group with a design pulling from Uni-Lions orange, flames licking across the shoe as a reference to the fearless approach he has brought to the mound as one of the league’s more promising young arms. FEARLESS sits along the inner panel, a word choice that tracks with how opposing hitters have started to talk about facing him.

kit

The cleats are only half of what Under Armour built for this year’s roster. Every Team UA player selected also received a HEATGEAR ELITE compression base layer, engineered to provide support through the specific physical demands of swinging, throwing, fielding, and sprinting across a full season. Each garment carries the player’s English initials and uniform number heat pressed into the fabric, extending the same personalization from the cleats into a piece of equipment that lives underneath the uniform rather than on top of it. It is a smaller gesture than the custom artwork, but it points to the same underlying idea: that the gear a player wears should say something about who they are, not just what brand they play in.

 

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why

Custom cleats are not a new idea in baseball. American players have worn personalized spikes for MLB’s own All-Star festivities for years, and college and high school programs have leaned into the trend at a smaller scale. What makes the CPBL rollout notable is the depth of storytelling packed into a shoe that, on the field, will be treated like any other piece of equipment, scuffed by dirt and worn down by a full slate of games before the season ends.

There is also something specific to Taiwan’s baseball culture in how this collection was built. Several of the players honored here, from Huang’s return to Kaohsiung to Lin’s ongoing stint in Japan, are stories the league’s fans already know well, and the cleats function as a kind of shorthand for narratives that would otherwise take a full broadcast segment to explain. A tiger stripe pattern says homecoming faster than a graphic package ever could. A shield says reliable faster than a stat line.

None of the nine designs will likely survive past this season intact. Cleats get replaced, repainted, or retired the way all baseball equipment eventually is. But for one week at Taipei Dome, and for as long as each player keeps lacing them up afterward, the shoes carry a version of the story that brought them there in the first place, stitched, painted, and pressed into leather rather than left to a highlight reel.

What lingers after the paint eventually chips and the cleats are swapped out for the next colorway is the underlying idea itself, which is simple enough to survive any single season. A shoe can be functional equipment and a piece of personal record at the same time, and a league that leans into that overlap ends up with something more interesting than another uniform reveal. For a handful of players in Taiwan this July, the smallest piece of their kit turned out to be the one saying the most.