Tseng Hao-jui drove in all four of the Lamigo Monkeys’ runs on a 2-for-4 effort as they doubled up on the Uni-President Lions in a 4-2 final at the Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium last night.
The win not only evened the weekend series between the two squads in Tainan with a victory each, but also breathed new life into the struggling Primates, because they won for only the second time in their past seven games to trail the third-placed Brother Elephants by six games.
“I hope [the win] can help put our recent slump behind us and be the beginning of a turnaround,” Tseng said after the game as he accepted the game MVP honor from league officials.
It is the first time he has won the honor this year, after seeing limited action because of injury earlier this season.
It was his two-run blast off Lions starter Mike McClung that gave the traveling Monkeys a quick 2-0 lead in the top of the first.
He single-handedly doubled the Monkeys’ lead in the third with a two-run double off the right-center wall to put his team ahead 4-0.
The home Cats managed to get a run back in the bottom of the same inning on the strength of Chen Yung-chi’s sacrifice fly off Lamigo starter Wang Fong-hsin and made it 4-2 in the fifth when Kao Chih-kang led off the inning with a double and scored on a wild pitch by Wang. However, that was as close as they got as the Monkeys right-hander answered with a perfect sixth and seventh before calling it a night.
After Hsieh Chang-rong tossed a perfect eighth, Hsu Ming-jeh followed with a perfect ninth to preserve the win for Wang.
Taking the loss was McClung, who pitched well enough to win with four allowed runs (three earned) on six hits, falling short of an even more impressive outing by Wang.
ELEPHANTS 7, RHINOS 4
Overcoming a three-run deficit with six unanswered runs in the sixth and seventh, the Brother Elephants turned the table on the EDA Rhinos with a 9-4 win at the Sinjhuang Baseball Stadium in New Taipei City last night to avenge Friday’s loss.
Huang Shih-hao’s nifty slide to the plate on a passed ball by Rhinos reliever Chen Huan-yang just avoided the tag by Chen to cap off a four-run seventh that gave the Elephants a 7-4 lead.
The Elephants completed the rout on the league-leaders with two more runs in the ninth.
Starter Lin En-yu was credited with the win for his six innings of four-run ball on nine hits, while the loss was charged to reliever Lai Hong-cheng, who surrendered the winning runs to the Elephants in the forgettable seventh.
ANFIELD BLUES: Kylian Mbappe arrived at Anfield on a run of 21 goals in 17 games, but he managed just three attempts in the match, none of them hitting the target Kylian Mbappe has been nearly unstoppable this season, but he hit a roadblock in their UEFA Champions League match at Anfield on Tuesday. For the second year running, the Real Madrid forward had a night to forget at Merseyside as Liverpool won 1-0. Mbappe looked a shadow of the player who has been tearing defenses apart all season. “We were lacking that threat in the final third,” said Madrid coach Xabi Alonso, without naming Mbappe individually. The FIFA World Cup winner for France rarely looked capable of finding a breakthrough against a Liverpool team who have been so defensively fragile for much of the
LOCAL SUCCESS: In the doubles, Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei and Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia defeated Italians Sara Errani and Jasmine Paolini in straight sets Elena Rybakina on Monday punched her ticket to the WTA Finals last four with an impressive 3-6, 6-1, 6-0 victory over second seed Iga Swiatek in round-robin play in Riyadh. After cruising past Amanda Anisimova in her opener on Saturday, Rybakina claimed her second win of the week to guarantee herself top spot in the Serena Williams Group. Anisimova on Monday rallied back from a set and a break down to triumph 4-6, 6-3, 6-2 in her all-American battle with seventh seed Madison Keys, who has been eliminated from the competition. “Madi was playing so well, it was quite a battle out there,”
For almost 30 minutes, Vitomir Maricic did not take a breath. Face down in a pool, surrounded by anxious onlookers, the Croatian freediver fought spasming pain to redefine what doctors thought was possible. When he finally surfaced, he had smashed the previous Guinness World Record for the longest breath-hold underwater by nearly five minutes. However, even with the help of pure oxygen before the attempt, it had pushed him to the limit. “Everything was difficult, just overwhelming,” Maricic, 40, told reporters, reflecting on the record-breaking day on June 14. “When I dive, I completely disconnect from everything, as if I’m not even there.
An amateur soccer league organized by farmers, students and factory workers in rural China has unexpectedly drawn millions of fans and inspired big cities to form their own, raising hopes China can grow talent from the ground up and finally become a global force. The nation of 1.4 billion people has about 200 million soccer fans, more than any other country, but it has failed to build world-class teams, partly due to a top-down approach where clubs pick players from a very small pool of prescreened candidates. The professional game is marred by a history of fixed matches, corruption, and dismal performances,
RSS