Managers from the champions of the Taiwanese, Australian, Japanese and South Korean professional leagues gathered at a press conference in Greater Taichung last night to promote this year’s Asia Series, which will commence at the Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium tomorrow afternoon.
With Taiwan’s Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) champs Uni-President Lions playing hosts to their counterparts from the Australian Baseball League’s Perth Heat, Nippon Professional Baseball’s (NPB) Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks and the Samsung Lions of Korea Professional Baseball for the first time in history, baseball fans around the nation will be treated to world-class diamond action when the four teams compete in the five-day event for bragging rights as Asia’s best baseball club.
“We are thrilled about having the chance to host an international event as visible and meaningful as this one and we hope to keep the title in Taiwan if we can,” Lions skipper Lu Wen-sheng said earlier last week.
His team had to wait until this past weekend for the NPB champions to be determined, as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March forced the league to postpone the start of its season by nearly a month.
It will be a brand new experience for most of the clubs and their players this year, because the tournament was suspended after the withdrawal of former title sponsor Konami Corp following the 2008 series. The CPBL announced the resumption of the event late last year with Taiwan hosting after Japan previously had the honor of hosting it at the Tokyo Dome since the tournament’s inaugural year in 2005.
This will be Australia’s first time in the event, taking China’s place, as they decided not to participate after an All-Star team from the China Baseball League (CBL) from 2005 to 2007 and the 2008 CBL champions Tianjin Lions finished last in the Asia Series each year.
The four teams will play in a round robin from tomorrow to Sunday before the teams with the two best win-loss percentages face off in the title game scheduled for Tuesday.
Standing in the way of the Lions keeping the trophy in Taiwan will be the favorites from Japan, whose NPB teams have taken all four Asia Series championships. The Hawks will also have the advantage of having just played a seven-game Japan Series, meaning they are still in game shape, compared with the three other teams, even though one could just as well argue that fatigue from lack of rest could hurt the Hawks.
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