The Brother Elephants improved to a league-best 4-2 mark with a 4-2 win over the Lamigo Monkeys at the Chengching Baseball Stadium in Greater Kaohsiung last night to force a tie atop the standings for first place with the Uni-President Lions.
Rookie starter Lu Shou-yu gave up an early run in the third inning on a pair of singles to the Monkeys, but quickly buckled down and retired all but two of the next dozen hitters he faced in a four-hit effort over 6-2/3 innings of work with no walks to snatch his first career victory.
Offensively for the men in the golden uniforms, the night belonged to veteran slugger Peng “Chia Chia” Cheng-min, whose clutch double down the right-field line scored both runners and turned a 0-1 deficit into a 2-1 lead for his team in the bottom of the sixth.
Photo: Huang Chih-yuan, Taipei Times
The Elephants tacked on a pair of runs in the seventh on the merit of back-to-back scoring singles by Chen Jiang-ho and Chen Chih-hong to claim a 4-1 advantage en route to the win.
Monkeys starter Ken Ray did not show his best stuff on the day as he surrendered four runs on nine hits over 6-1/3 frames of work to suffer his first defeat of the season. The American right-hander is now 1-1 with an ERA of 3.86.
LIONS 2, BULLS 0
The Uni-President Lions dealt the Sinon Bulls their fifth straight loss of the season by blanking the Bulls in a 2-0 shutout at the Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium last night.
Right-hander Yuya Kamada took a three-hit shutout bid through the seventh for the second straight start before his bullpen followed with a scoreless eighth and ninth to keep the shutout win intact for the Japanese native who improved to a league-best 2-0 for the season.
The classic pitchers’ duel saw Kamada outhurl his counterpart Lin Chi-wei, who gave up a run on four hits while fanning eight in six innings to lose the game despite pitching a quality start. The loss set Lin back to 0-2 as the Bulls remain winless at 0-5 so far this year.
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