Close plays dominated the league’s action on Thursday night with the President Lions edging past the La New Bears 3-2 at the Kaohsiung County Baseball Stadium and the Sinon Bulls topping dmedia T-Rex in a 4-3 final at the Taichung Municipal Baseball Stadium.
Pan “Du Du” Wei-luen continued his record-breaking streak with his 19th straight win that dates back to last March by throwing six solid innings of one-run ball, and Kao Guo-ching drove in a pair of runs with a standup double in the top of the first to lead the Lions to their big win.
The victory not only helped the Lions sweep the two-game series against their archrivals but also put them atop the league standings with a half-game lead over the previously top-ranked Bears.
Kao’s two-run double off Bears starter Hsu Wen-hsiung in the top of the first quickly put the Lions ahead 2-0 before the home Bears managed to answer with a run of their own off Du Du two innings later when Gary Burnham was hit by a pitch from the Lions hurler with the bases loaded to force home the runner from third.
Leading 2-1, the visitors added another run in the fifth on Wang Tzu-song’s sacrifice-fly off Hsu after he allowed a leadoff walk to start the inning and served up a single on the ensuing play to place runners at the corners.
The Bears made things interesting in the bottom of the ninth when Pan Chung-wei led off the inning with a solo home run off Gregory Wiltshire to fall within a run and threaten to rally for more with Huang “Easy” Long-yi lining a single up the middle and stealing second to represent the tying run with only one out.
That was as close as the Bears got as Wiltshire calmly retired the next two batters in order to preserve the win.
Hsu suffered the loss for the Bears in his fourth quality start in six chances with three runs allowed on five hits while fanning six and walking a pair.
BULLS 4, T-REX 3
Cheng Jau-han’s RBI-double off Chen Jien-fu broke a 3-3 tie in the bottom of the seventh as the Sinon Bulls held on to beat the dmedia T-Rex 4-3 to close out the two-game set with a tie and a win.
It was Cheng’s second straight clutch hit in as many days; the first being Wednesday night’s tie-forcing RBI-single in a 12-inning marathon before Thursday’s game-winning swing.
The seesaw battle began with T-Rex striking first in the top of the third on a run-scoring single by Kuo Ming-ren before the Bulls returned the favor by plating the equalizer in the bottom of the same inning with Huang Chung-yi’s RBI-single to left to tie it at 1-all.
After T-Rex took a 2-1 lead in the fourth, the Bulls fought back again in the bottom of the same inning, this time on a two-run error by the T-Rex shortstop on a would-be inning-ending out.
T-Rex levelled with Chen Yuan-jia’s solo blast to left setting the stage for Cheng’s game-deciding hit.
Picking up his first win of the season after having dropped three in a row was Shen who tossed three innings of one-run relief to beat Chen, who went the distance for the T-Rex in a losing effort as three of the four runs he allowed were unearned due to the two errors that his defense committed in the game.
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