Hideki Matsui hit a home run as the New York Yankees won their first playoff game in their new ball park with a 7-2 victory over Minnesota in game one of their opening-round series.
Japan’s Matsui blasted a two-run homer in the fifth inning and pitcher CC Sabathia struck out eight batters for New York in front of a crowd of 49,464 on Wednesday at Yankee Stadium.
Derek Jeter also homered and went two-for-two with two RBI and three runs scored and Alex Rodriguez drove in two runs for the Yankees, who won their eighth straight game against the Twins this year with no losses.
“I think this is the fun time of the year, this is when you like to play as a player,” Jeter said. “You try to treat it like any other game. Baseball is baseball.”
The second game of this Major League Baseball series is today at Yankee Stadium.
The eight strikeouts was a career playoff high for Sabathia, who gave up two runs including one earned.
“We know what we need to do, we know that these are big games,” Sabathia said. “They are always big games in the playoffs. It just feels good to start it off the right way.”
Rodriguez batted two-for-four and scored a run for New York, who won the AL East for the 10th time in the last 12 years with a MLB-best 103 wins.
Heading into the American League first round playoff series, Rodriguez was a disappointing seven-for-44 over the past three post-season series for the Yankees.
Nick Swisher also finished with an RBI for the Yankees.
Michael Cuddyer had the only RBI for Minnesota, who were seven games out of first place at one point and became the first team to earn a playoff spot trailing by three with four games to play.
Orlando Cabrera and Joe Mauer both had two hits and scored in the loss.
Twins pitcher Brian Duensing gave up five runs on seven hits with a walk and three strikeouts.
Francisco Liriano came on in relief and Matsui greeted him with a blast into Monument Park in center field to make it 6-2 in the fifth.
“Franky [Liriano] is here for a reason,” Twins manager Ron Gardenhire said. “We like him to pitch and he needs to pitch. Our bullpen has been through a lot. We all saw that. He was fresh and available.”
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