Avenging a disappointing loss from the night before, the La New Bears humbled the Brother Elephants in a 10-4 final at the Kaohsiung County Baseball Stadium on Saturday night to nip a two-game losing skid.
After failing to protect a late-game lead on Friday, the rambunctious home Bears returned to the field with revenge on their minds.
And that was enough for them to thwart the visiting Elephants with seven runs over the first two frames, highlighted by Chen Chin-fong’s two-run blast off Elephants reliever Lee Hao-ren in the second for his second homer of the season.
PHOTO: CHANG CHUNG-YI, TAIPEI TIMES
Also starring with his second long ball of the year for the Bears was slugger Lin Chih-sheng, who tattooed a belt-high fastball from the Elephants’ Liu Yu-chan in the fourth to give his team a 9-2 lead.
On the mound for the Bears with six-and-two-thirds of decent pitching was starter Chang Chih-jia, who allowed four runs on eight hits while fanning four and walking a pair to earn his first win of the season.
As for the Elephants, failure to come up with timely hits cost them the game as they tied the Bears at nine hits but only managed to produce four runs in the process.
BULLS 4, LIONS 4
Chang Jien-ming’s triple in the eighth inning with a runner on second scored the game-tying run for the Sinon Bulls against the Uni-President Lions and that was how it ended as the two clubs took the game all the way through the 12th to settle with a rare tie in Tainan on Saturday evening.
The showdown in the South between the top-ranked Bulls and the defending champs saw the two squads trading a run each during the first two innings.
The Bulls skidded ahead by two runs in the top of the fifth on back-to-back RBI-singles by Hsieh “the Ugly” Jia-shien and Cheng Da-hong to lead it 3-1.
However, the home cats responded in the bottom of the same inning by getting one of the two runs back on Chen Lien-hong’s liner to left and eventually took a 4-3 lead of their own in the sixth to set the table for Chang’s game-tying triple.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier