CPBL: The La New Bears continued their winning ways by sweeping the two-game series against the Chinatrust Whales with a 12-9 win at the Kaohsiung County Baseball Stadium on Sunday to boost their record to a league-best 9-2 in the second half.
The win capped a near-perfect week of play for the high-flying Bears who won three of the four games over the seven-day span by splitting a two-game set against the President Lions earlier in the week before taking two straight from the marine creatures.
Leading the way for the Bears offense was slugger Chen Chin-fong who went 7-for-14 with four RBIs in the week. The outstanding play by the former major leaguer not only improved Chen’s team-leading batting average to .358 (second best in the league behind the Brother Elephants’ Peng Cheng-min), but also gave him 54 RBIs to lead the league.
Also starring for the Bears was Huang “Easy” Long-yi who batted 3-for-4 with three RBIs to pick up his 91^st base hit of the season. The veteran outfielder needed only 60 games to reaching the 90-hit plateau, beating the old record for fastest to amass 90 in a single season at 61 games that had been shared by Tseng Kwei-chang in 1996, Rafaelito Mercedez in 1997, and Peng in 2004.
Picking up his league-leading 13th victory of the season for the Bears was starter Mike Johnson who remained unbeaten at 13-0 with a big win over the Lions in the Bears’ week-opener on Tuesday by pitching one-run ball on six hits over as many innings in a 4-1 win. The Bears were the lone team making a big push in the second half. With the hiring of coaching legend Hsu Sheng-ming as their manager last Thursday, the Sinon Bulls also showed their desire to contend for the second-half title after a disappointing first-half.
The new Sinon skipper who had managed the former Weichuan Dragons to three league titles in the late 1990s, as well as taking the Taiwan national team to the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens before resigning as the Whales headman in 2005, will try to bring back the glories for the Bulls who won back-to-back titles as recently as 2005 before suffering consecutive losing seasons with a 48-49-3 record in 2006 and a league-worst 42-57-1 mark last year.
The New Taipei Kings claimed the inaugural Taiwan Professional Basketball League (TPBL) championship on Sunday, defeating the Kaohsiung FamilyMart Aquas 108-89 in the final. Playing at home, the Kings pulled ahead with Jeremy Lin’s (林書豪) clutch three-pointers, securing their victory over the Aquas in the TPBL final. The Kings came out strong in the first quarter, dominating to build a 35-18 lead. By halftime, they had stretched their advantage to 61-38. In the third quarter, the Aquas narrowed the deficit to 12 points, but Lin stepped up, sinking several tough three- pointers to extend the lead. In the final quarter, the Kings pushed the
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