One victory shy of their first-ever Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) regular-season title (first-half title), the Macoto Cobras can wrap things up with a win or a tie against the President Lions in Tainan on Thursday to claim the first-half regular-season title.
The odds are in the serpents' favor in that the second-placed Sinon Bulls would have to win their game against the Chinatrust Whales in Hualien (also on Thursday) while the Cobras lose theirs against the Lions in order to force a one-game playoff (scheduled for Chiayi on July 21) between the two teams to determine which one would win the first-half title.
Wrap-Up
PHOTO: BROTHER ELEPHANTS
With the Bulls having played two more games than the Cobras as of last Monday, the Cobras had to win at least two of the three makeup games scheduled for this week in order to assure themselves at least a tie with the Bulls for the first-half title. And they have done just that by winning Tuesday's contest over the Brother Elephants by a 10-6 margin before beating the La New Bears in Kaohsiung on Wednesday in a 4-1 decision.
Cobras 10, Elephants 6
Tuesday night's 10-6 win by the serpents had the Elephants striking first in the top of the second inning on a two-run home run by leftfielder Chen Huai-shan off Cobras starter Hsu Chu-jien.
PHOTO: BROTHER ELEPHANTS
The lead would only last momentarily as the Cobras offense answered in the bottom of the same inning with catcher Wu Jau-hui's opposite-field double that was good for a pair of runs as well.
First baseman Hsieh Jia-shien and centerfielder Mario Encarnacion then put the Cobras up 4-2 with an RBI single each in the third before the Elephants retook a 5-4 lead in the top of the sixth on the strength of Chen Huai-shan's three-run blast, his fourth of the season.
Trailing for the second time in the game, the Cobras went ahead for good with a six-run sixth when they rang up three singles, a double, and a three-run homer (by Encarnacion) off two different Elephants pitchers to take a 10-5 lead.
The Elephants would make it 10-6 in the ninth but that was as close as they got.
Cobras set-up man Lee Ming-jing tossed 1-1/3 innings of shutout ball for his second win of the year while his counterpart Chang Shih-kai suffered his third loss of the season for yielding four of the six runs in the game-turning sixth inning.
Chen Huai-shan's five-RBI night marked his second straight five-RBI game to give the red-hot Elephants switch-hitter a total of 10 in the past two contests.
Cobras 4, Bears 1
Joining fellow starters Lin En-yu and Hsu Chu-jien, Lin Ying-jeh became the third Cobras pitcher with seven wins this season when he held the Bears to a lone run on four hits over seven phenomenal innings to lead his team to a 4-1 win at Kaohsiung on Wednesday.
The game was the continuation of a rain-suspended contest on May 12th between the two squads where the Cobras had taken a 2-0 lead after two innings of play.
The 2-0 Cobras lead was quickly doubled in the third when second baseman Deng Shih-yang knocked in two more runs with a lining shot to right off Bears starter Hsu Yu-wei.
Neither offense managed to score again until the bottom of the sixth when Bears slugger Pan Chung-wei's sacrifice fly scored teammate Lin Chih-sheng, who led off the inning with a clean single off Lin Ying-jeh, to help avoid an otherwise embarrassing shutout loss.
Elephants 6, Whales 6
Chen Huai-shan's three-run triple in the top of the seventh breathed sudden life back into the Elephants who had trailed the Chinatrust Whales up to that point in a 4-0 game in Hualien on Monday.
Though the Whales would patch their 4-3 lead by a couple of runs in the eighth on back-to-back scoring singles by Kuo Dai-yung and Chen Jia-hong, it was the Elephants who won a huge moral victory by forcing a 6-all tie with a three-run ninth, thanks to homers by Peng "Chia Chia" Cheng-ming (solo shot) and Chen Huai-shan (two-run shot) in the final inning of play.
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