Orlando Roman went the distance with nine innings of two-hit ball, Peng “Chia Chia” Cheng-min picked up his 999th career hit to drive in an insurance run as the Brother Elephants went on to blank the Uni-President Lions 2-0 at the Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium last night.
The win not only maintained the Elephants’ narrow one-game lead over the second-place Sinon Bulls, who also won on the night, but also extended their season-high win streak to eight straight and counting, making them the hottest team in the league at the moment.
The Elephants jumped all over a wild Luther Hackman with a run in the opening inning after the Lions starter issued a pair of walks and hit a batter with the bases loaded to squeeze in the first run of the contest.
The 1-0 advantage stood for the men in yellow through the fifth with neither offense able to strike again against Roman and Hackman, who allowed only three combined hits over the same span.
However, the opportunistic Elephant bats were too hot to be denied as Chen Guan-ren led the sixth with a clean double off Hackman and scored on the ensuing play when Chia Chia come up with a timely single off reliever Lin Cheng-fong. This followed Hackman’s ejection from the game by the home plate umpire for repeatedly covering up the mound with dirt after several warnings.
The 2-0 lead proved sufficient for Roman as he retired all but one of the 13 batters he faced from the sixth through the ninth to record his second complete-game shutout win of the year.
Taking the loss was Hackman, who was obviously upset with the ejection call as he lasted five-plus innings with two allowed runs (only one earned) on as many hits to fall to 5-7 for the year.
Bulls 4 Bears 1
Tempers flared in the contest between the Sinon Bulls and the La New Bears last night with two Sinon players and the manager tossed by the home plate umpire for challenging the strike zone in a 4-1 road victory for the Bulls at the Kaohsiung County Baseball Stadium.
Sinon skipper Hsu Sheng-ming was tossed after he came out of the dugout in the eighth to argue a strike call by the home plate umpire following the ejection of two of his players earlier in the game.
However, the unusually high tension on the field did not rattle Sinon starter Chang Geng-hao as the rookie hurler cruised through the eighth pitching one-run ball before closer Takatsu Shingo of Japan tossed a scoreless ninth to preserve the win for Chang.
Offensively for the Bulls, Cheng Jau-han’s two-out single in the top of the fourth capped a two-run rally that erased an early 1-0 deficit before they added two more runs in the seventh, courtesy of Lin Tsung-nan’s sacrifice fly and a pickoff attempt by Bear starter Ken Ray that sailed wide to score the runner from third.
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