The top-ranked President Lions bounced back from a 0-4 shutout loss to the Chinatrust Whales on Saturday with a 6-1 win over the Brother Elephants at the Taichung Municipal Baseball Stadium on Sunday to nip a two-game losing streak.
Louis Pote improved to 9-1 for the year with the win after turning in another quality start, allowing the lone Elephants run on three hits over six frames despite issuing a season-high five walks.
He also received plenty of run support from the Lions lineup, with Pan Wu-hsiung and Kuo Dai-chi leading the way by going a combined four-for-seven with a pair of RBIs each to account for the bulk of their team’s runs.
PHOTO: LIU HSIN-DE, TAIPEI TIMES
Pan managed to reach third on a single to left that skidded past the Elephants left-fielder, before scoring on Kuo’s infield single with two outs to give the Lions a quick 1-0 lead in the top of the first.
The Lions would double their lead to 2-0 in the third on an RBI single by Pan, before the Elephants countered with a run of their own in the bottom of the same inning on an opposite-field double by Peng “Chia Chia” Cheng-min to make it 2-1.
That was all the runs that either team would score through the sixth, with Pote and his counterpart Danny Core of the Elephants holding their ground, before the Lions struck for a run in each of the remaining innings to put the game away.
T-Rex 4, Bulls 0
The dmedia T-Rex finished off the week strongly on Sunday with an impressive 4-0 blanking of the Sinon Bulls at the Taipei Municipal Baseball Stadium in Tianmu.
The victory also put a positive spin on the end of the first half of the season for the T-Rex under their new owners as they finished with an acceptable 21-28-1 record.
Back-to-back errors by the Sinon defense led to two unearned runs in a four-run fourth. And that was the difference in the game as neither side was able to score again against the solid pitching of dmedia starter Chen Jia-hong and Sinon reliever Du Yen-jeh and Michael Connolly from the fifth inning to the end.
Picking up his first win of the year was Chen, who scattered three singles over five scoreless innings to beat his counterpart Lin Chi-wei, who cruised through the first three innings before running into all sorts of trouble in the fourth.
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