Steve Hammond pitched a one-hit complete game, while Tsai Jien-wei drove in the game’s lone run as the Lamigo Monkeys edged past the Brother Elephants in a 1-0 final at the Greater Kaohsiung Baseball Stadium last night.
The win not only avenged a bitter loss for the Monkeys to the Elephants by the same score the night before, which kicked off the second half of the season on a down note, but it also brought the Monkeys into the win column as they looked to improve on a second-place finish in the first half of the season, with their eye on the second-half title and a chance to play in the postseason.
The highly anticipated pitchers’ duel between Hammond and his counterpart, Orlando Roman, lived up to its billing with both starters bending, but not breaking, by working out of jams to keep it a 1-0 game well into the late innings.
Photo: Huang Chih-yuan, Taipei Times
Unfortunately for Roman, the lone run that he surrendered in the top of the second proved one run too many as Hammond kept his ground the entire way despite giving up seven hits over eight frames, to pocket his first complete-game shutout win of the year.
“The three hits in the second inning really hurt us tonight,” Brother Elephants manager Chen Rei-chen said after the game, referring to the three hits that Roman gave up in the decisive second in an otherwise solid performance.
Offensively for the Monkeys, Tsai’s timely single with runners at the corners in the top of the second was the all difference in the game.
BULLS 8, LIONS 1
Erupting for 20 hits in a rare offensive explosion, the Sinon Bulls trounced the Uni-President Lions in an 8-1 rout at the Sinjhuang Baseball Stadium in New Taipei City last night for their first triumph of the second half.
Tragic hero Lin Ying-jeh, who was 2-8 in the first half despite collecting eight quality starts in the process, won his first start of the second half by allowing a run on five hits in 6-1/3 innings of work. He finally got the run support that his offense had denied him in the first half with four early runs through the third, giving him a 4-1 lead that he took well into the seventh inning.
Doing the damage at the plate was a rapid-firing Sinon lineup that teed off against the Lions pitching with a dozen hits off starter Dan Reichert over six innings, before ripping out eight more against four other Lion hurlers in the final three frames to end the slugfest.
Seven of the Bulls starting lineup had multi-hit games, highlighted by Chang Jien-ming’s 4 for 4 night with a pair of RBIs.
Chang’s RBI single in the top of the first got things moving in the right direction for the Bulls, before their offense rang up three more runs over the next two innings to spot Lin a 4-1 lead.
Sinon would tack on aonther in the seventh that made it 5-1, before a three-run eighth that sealed any hope for an improbable comeback for the Lions.
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