Taiwan’s Kuo Hong-chih could be the closer for the Los Angeles Dodgers this year as the club enters the season with an unsettled bullpen while hoping to avoid back-to-back losing seasons for the first time since 1986-1987.
Kuo was assigned the job when Jonathan Broxton blew some save opportunities in the second half of last year.
On the question of whether Broxton could still close, an official Web site article said Broxton’s fastball last year lost a few ticks on the radar gun, but management believed his second-half collapse was mostly mental.
“A closer with doubts is a very dicey proposition, so even though he comes to camp with the job, the assumption is that his leash will be short,” the article said.
“With Hong-chih Kuo and Kenley Jansen, the Dodgers have some options, although Kuo’s durability will always be a question mark because of his elbow, and Jansen is so inexperienced the Dodgers aren’t ready to anoint him just yet,” the article said.
Taiwanese world No. 1 women’s doubles star Hsieh Su-wei on Saturday overcame a first-set loss to win her opening match at the Madrid Open. Top seeds Hsieh and partner Elise Mertens of Belgium, with whom she last month won her fourth Indian Wells women’s doubles title, bounced back from a rocky first set to beat Asia Muhammad of the US and Aldila Sutjiadi of Indonesia 2-6, 6-4, 10-2. Hsieh and Mertens were next to face Heather Watson of the UK and Xu Yifan of China in the round of 16. Thirty-eight-year-old Hsieh last month reclaimed her world No. 1 spot after her Indian
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Chen Yi-tung (陳奕通) secured a historic Olympic berth on Sunday by winning the senior men’s foil event at the 2024 Asia Oceania Zonal Olympic Fencing Qualifiers in United Arab Emirates. Chen defeated Samuel Elijah of Singapore 15-4 in the final in Dubai to secure the only wild card in the event, making him the first male Olympian fencer from Taiwan in 36 years and only the sixth Taiwanese fencer to ever qualify for the quadrennial event. The last appearance by a Taiwanese male fencer at the Olympics was in 1988, when Wang San-tsai (王三財) and Cheng Ming-hsiang (鄭明祥) competed in Seoul. The
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