Beyond the diamond: Social support, masculine habitus, and identity recalibration among CPBL elite professionals transitioning beyond baseball—An interpretative phenomenological analysis

Abstract

Aimd Taiwan's high-stakes professional baseball culture − where early specialisation curtails credentials and masculine norms valorise stoicism − retired Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) elites’ pivots to non-sport careers expose profound transition precarity, a phenomenon still little explored in East Asian settings. This interpretative phenomenological analysis, drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice, explores how seven such retired players (aged 29–46, with 3–12 years at the elite level) experienced social support from personal and organisational sources. Semi-structured interviews unveiled a temporally sequenced trajectory: visceral loss and rejection buffered by peers’ embodied attunement − forged in shared ‘grind’ − over family's experiential distance; shame-laden inhibitions on help-seeking, exacting mental health tolls; and reciprocal exchanges, where providing support paradoxically accelerated identity recalibration, repurposing habitus-bound resilience into leadership legacies. Innovating transition scholarship, findings theorise support's intersubjective quality as recognition countering diminishment, unmasking hegemonic masculinity's psychic costs, and elevating ‘giving’ as a flourishing mechanism − beyond coping paradigms. With global portability to Confucian-inflected sports, policy directives compel CPBL: peer-mentoring circuits that bypass stigma, pre-retirement capital audits (e.g., tactical nous to vocations), and low-threat digital scaffolds − birthing self-sustaining communities that liberate elite exits and convert vulnerabilities into societal assets.