Pan “Du Du” Wei-luen pitched five innings of shutout ball and Liu Fu-hao hit a two-run homer as the President Lions downed the La New Bears 8-3 in Tainan on Thursday evening to reclaim the top spot in the league standings.
Unable to begin his campaign during the first month of competition because of an unspecified injury, “Du Du” finally made his first trip to the mound on Thursday, looking to make up for lost time. And it was a huge success for the Lions ace who finished last year with a league-best 16-2 record that earned him the league’s biggest paycheck for a local pitcher (NT$460,000 per month).
The showdown between the top two clubs in the league was a scoreless affair until the Lions broke through in the bottom of the third with Liu’s two-run blast off Bears starter Andrew Loraine, to give the defending champions a quick 2-0 advantage.
The Lions would double their lead two innings later in the fifth when Kao Guo-ching drove in a pair of runs with a clean double to the right-center gap that made it 4-0 before the Bears finally got on the board in the sixth. That was on a two-out single by Huang Hsiao-wei that scored Tseng Hao-jui who doubled off Lions reliever Shen Bo-chang to put himself in a scoring position.
A pair of runs each by the Lions offense in the seventh and eighth eventually put the game out of reach for the Bears, even though the Bears managed to score two meaningless runs in the top of the ninth to make the final score more respectable.
Picking up his first win of the season with five solid innings of work was Pan, who allowed no runs on five hits. He also fanned five and walked one in a victory that stretched his winning streak to 17 in a row, a run that dates back to March last year.
Whales 7, Elephants 4, 11 innings
A ninth-inning collapse by the Brother Elephants bullpen led to a game-tying run for the Chinatrust Whales, with the Whales going on to win it 7-4 in the eleventh to end a six-game losing skid.
After trailing 0-3 for most of the game, the Elephants finally broke up the shutout bid by scoring four in the bottom of the eighth to take a 4-3 lead.
But with the win just one out away, normally reliable closer Todd Moser would serve up back-to-back doubles to the Whales’ Wang Jung-ren and Wang Yi-min, the second of which drove in the tying run.
After the Elephants failed to score in the bottom of the ninth, the momentum clearly shifted back to the Whales in the extra innings as they went on to score three in the eleventh to take the win.
Rookie right-hander Huang Hong-ren was credited with his first career win for tossing three-and-a-third innings of scoreless relief on four hits to beat his counterpart, Tseng Jia-min, who dropped his second straight with a sub-par outing to remain winless at 0-2 for the year.
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