Peng "Chia Chia" Cheng-min hit his league-leading 13th home run of the season and Antonio Alvarez went 4-for-5 with three RBIs to lift the Brother Elephants past the President Lions in a 13-6 win at Tainan on Saturday night.
The Elephants have quietly taken six of their last eight games to fall within four games of the league-leading Macoto Cobras with a formidable lineup that averaged over 7.3 runs per game over the eight-game span.
"We are seeing the ball extremely well over the past two weeks, that's why the runs are coming," Chen Rei-cheng said after the game. Five of his teammates are batting higher than .320, an incredible feat that must have opposing pitchers feeling nervous.
The Elephants could easily be the best club in the league if they can improve on a pitching staff that has a team earned run average higher than 4.25.
Saturday's contest began with the Elephants greeting Lions starter Rob Cordemans with a three-run first on the strength of four singles and a throwing error by Lions' shortstop Hsu Sheng-jeh.
The men in the golden uniforms doubled their lead by the end of the fourth with a run in the third and two more in the fourth before making it 7-0 in the top of the fifth.
That was when the Lions decided to show off their bats with five runs of their own in the bottom of the fifth, courtesy of five straight two-out singles on top of a Brother error, to trail the Elephants 7-5.
After a scoreless sixth, the Elephants put the game out of reach with five more runs in the seventh.
Picking up the victory was Elephants reliever Liu Jung-nan who entered in the bottom of the fifth in relief of starter Yeh Yong-jeh with two-and-a-third innings of shutout relief for his fourth win of the season.
Suffering the loss for the home Lions was Cordemans who fell to 3-4 for the year, allowing six runs (four earned) on seven hits in three-and-a-third innings of play.
Cobras 8, Bulls 3
Four sixth-inning runs by the Macoto Cobras, highlighted by game-MVP Ivanon Coffie's three-run homer off Yang Jien-fu, broke up the Sinon starter's shutout bid as the Cobras went on to beat the Bulls 8-3 in Sinjuang on Saturday.
Lin Chung-nan's lining single off Cobras starter Kim Jebin got the Bulls on the board in the bottom of the third to back up five shutout innings of work by Yang in a 1-0 affair.
That would change on a dime as the Cobras erupted for four runs in the sixth to take the lead for good.
Although the Bulls added a run in the bottom of the sixth on Chen Chih-wei's groundout to short, that was as close as they got as the Cobras tacked on a pair of runs each over the final two frames to win.
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