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.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier