The top-ranked Uni-President Lions continued their dominance over the Brother Elephants by downing their archrivals from the north 6-4 in Kaohsiung on Sunday to sweep the three-game series.
The win was not only the Lions’ fourth straight and their 10th in 12 games, but also their sixth in a row over the Elephants, giving the Lions a commanding 8-3 margin in the 11 games they have played so far this season.
Stellar bullpen work on the part of the Lions was the difference as Hsu Yu-wei, Tseng Yi-cheng and Lin Yueh-pin combined for three scoreless innings of one-hit relief to give the Lions offense a chance to break a 4-4 tie over the final three frames for the win.
Neither of the starters — Chu Wei-ming for the Lions and Liao Yu-cheng for the Elephants — managed to control the opposing bats, with four allowed runs apiece over the first five-and-a-half innings, as the Elephants rallied to force the third tie of the game at 4-4 in the top of the sixth.
It took a sacrifice-fly by the Lions’ Kao Guo-ching off Wang Jing-li following a pair of walks issued by the Elephants reliever to push the Lions ahead 5-4 in the bottom of the sixth. They added an insurance run in the seventh against Elephants reliever Matt Perisho to put the game away.
Picking up his second win of the year with six innings of four-run ball (two earned) on 10 hits was Chu, while Wang took the loss for issuing a pair of walks in the decisive sixth that proved to be the difference in the game.
BEARS 8, BULLS 5
The La New Bears clinched their three-game set over the Sinon Bulls by a 2-1 margin with a victory in the series finale at the Hualien County Baseball Stadium on Sunday.
The Bears offense took advantage of a wild Yang Jien-fu in the third inning by plating five runs on three singles, a pair of walks and wild pitches by the Bulls starter. A costly error by the Bulls defense made it 6-1 after three innings of play.
After the Bulls scored the next four runs to make it 6-5 in the sixth, the Bears quickly looked to Chen Chin-fong to widen their lead as the former Major Leaguer went deep with his seventh homer of the year, a solo shot off Bulls reliever Shen Yu-jeh, to give his team a 7-5 advantage.
Lin Chih-pin’s RBI-single following Tsai Jien-wei’s rare triple made it 8-5 in the seventh to conclude the scoring, as the Bulls failed to score again against stellar relief by Tseng Jau-hao, who tossed nearly four innings of shutout ball to earn his first win of the season.
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