Taking all of an offering from Uni-President Lions reliever Kao Jien-san, Manny Ramirez hit the ball over the center-field wall at the Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium last night for his first homer since arriving in Taiwan.
Even though the two-run shot did not help Ramirez’s EDA Rhinos win the game — they lost 10-7 — he did come away with the distinction of hitting the league’s 7,000th home run.
“Wow, I didn’t know about [it being the 7,000th homer], it’s great,” he said after the game.
Photo: Huang Chih-yuan, Taipei Times
The former major league MVP drove in three runs on a three-for-four night in his best outing of the season so far.
A seven-run fifth by the Lions made the difference in the game as it turned a 1-2 deficit into an 8-2 advantage, a lead the hosts would not relinquish to win their seventh game of the year.
ELEPHANTS 4, MONKEYS 2
Chang Chih-hao’s two-run blast off Ben Snyder in the top of the 10th put the Brother Elephants ahead 4-2, and they held on to win by the same margin at the Taoyuan International Baseball Stadium last night to claim their second straight victory.
Former European champions Celtic exited the UEFA Champions League in the qualifiers after a 3-2 penalty shoot-out defeat at Kazakhstan’s Kairat Almaty on Tuesday, following two goalless legs in the playoff tie. Kairat are to compete in the competition proper for the first time, while Norway’s Bodo/Glimt and Cyprus’s Pafos also secured debut appearances after coming through the playoffs. Celtic’s night ended in disappointment as they missed three penalties in the shoot-out, Daizen Maeda failing with the decisive spot-kick. The slugfest of a match went into extra-time with neither side finding the net and few overall chances, echoing the first
Rangers on Wednesday bowed out of the UEFA Champions League playoffs with a humiliating 6-0 defeat at the hands of Club Brugge which piles further pressure on head coach Russell Martin, while SL Benfica secured a place in the competition proper at the expense of Jose Mourinho’s Fenerbahce. The Glasgow giants traveled to Belgium right up against it after losing 3-1 at home in last week’s first leg, when they conceded three times in the opening 20 minutes. They never looked like turning the tie around as Club Brugge took the lead inside five minutes at the Jan Breydelstadion through Nicolo Tresoldi
Noah Lyles on Thursday warmed up for the upcoming athletics world championships by chasing down Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo to win the 200m at the Diamond League final. Lyles trailed Tebogo at the start, but gradually erased the deficit over the final 100m and pipped the Botswana sprinter to the line by centimeters. Lyles, the Olympic 100m champion and reigning world champion in both the 100m and 200m, clocked 19.74 seconds in a slight headwind. Tebogo was 0.02 seconds behind. It was Lyles’ sixth Diamond League title, a record for track athletes. “Six, that’s a big number,” Lyles said. “Shoot, that’s another record on
Mitch Brown finally had enough as he watched unfolding coverage of yet another case of homophobic abuse in the Australian Football League (AFL), and decided it was time to change the narrative. Brown contacted the Daily Aus with a message that the online news site published yesterday: “I played in the AFL for 10 years for the West Coast Eagles, and I’m a bisexual man.” In almost 130 years of top-flight competition in Australia’s homegrown football code, no past or active male player had publicly identified as bisexual or gay. Aussie Rules was a long way behind other types of