Taiwan won their third game in as many days at the Intercontinental Cup Baseball Championship last night, shutting out Hong Kong 10-0 in seven innings in Taichung to improve to 3-0 in Group A.
Starter Lin Chen-hua struck out nine while walking none over seven innings in a two-hit gem, despite a lack of run support in the early innings, to pick up the complete-game win. He would have gone two more innings to get the full shutout the old-fashioned way as his pitch-count only ran up to 77 after the seventh, were it not for the mercy rule that called the game after Taiwan took a 10-run lead.
“I am glad I was able to go out and keep the opposing hitters from scoring because our hitters had some trouble earlier,” Lin said after the game.
His offense only managed to plate two runs on five hits through four against Hong Kong starter Leung Yu Chung before piling on eight runs on a dozen more hits from the fifth on.
Doing the damage at the plate for the hosts were Lin Chih-sheng and Chen Chun-hsiu, whose three hits apiece with five RBIs on the night accounted for half of Taiwan’s total offense. All, but one of the six combined hits by Lin and Chen went for extra bases, with Lin clearing two triples off Leung.
“It [hitting two triples] really eased some frustration,” Lin Chih-sheng said after the game.
He had gone hitless and hit into a double play the day before in Taiwan’s win over the Czech Republic in a sub-par performance.
Taiwan took a 1-0 lead in the second when Chen led off the inning with a double and scored two batters later on Kao Guo-ching’s RBI groundout.
After Chen’s run-scoring double made it 2-0 in the third and a scoreless fourth, the Taiwanese bats came alive, rolling off three straight extra-base hits to double the lead before erupting for six more runs over the sixth and seventh innings to earn the win.
“We’ll definitely try to correct our slow starts because it will really hurt us against a top team,” Taiwan’s skipper Yeh Chih-hsien said.
His team take on defending champs Cuba in Douliou at 6:30pm this evening.
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