Continuing their mastery over the opposition, the Brother Elephants doubled up on the Sinon Bulls by a 4-2 margin at the Taichung Municipal Baseball Stadium on Thursday to sweep their two-game series.
It was their fourth straight victory and seventh in the past eight. They are now in an all-out effort to contend for the second-half title as they trail the top-ranked La New Bears and the Uni-President Lions (tied for first) by just one game in the standings.
Leading the way with yet another fine performance on the mound was Elephants starter Tseng Jia-min, who allowed a run on three hits over six-and-two-third effective innings of play to win his sixth of the season. Other than a few control problems from time to time, with five walks issued, Tseng managed to take a 4-0 shutout into the seventh, before giving up a run to lose the shutout bid.
PHOTO: CHAN CHAO-YANG, TAIPEI TIMES
Offensively for the men in the golden uniforms, Chen “Golden Warrior” Chih-yuan batted a solid two-for-four, with a home run and two RBIs in his fourth straight multi-hit outing.
LIONS 5, T-REX 4
Kuo Jung-yo’s two-run double capped a four-run fifth that broke open a 1-1 tie for the Uni-President Lions and they held on to defeat the dmedia T-Rex 5-4 at the Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium on Thursday night.
The win propelled the home Cats to a tie for first with the idle Bears, who saw their half-game lead erased as the race for the elusive second-half title heightened, with a lone game separating the top three clubs in the league.
Picking up the win in his first career start was Lions lefty Pan Jung-rong, who surrendered a run on five hits over five-and-two-third innings of work to beat his counterpart and former teammate Chiang Bo-ching, who cruised through the first four innings before running into a world of trouble in a dreadful fifth that cost T-Rex the game.
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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
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