Yasiel Puig and Paul Goldschmidt had not left the stadium before workers began dismantling what was quite an impressive place to play baseball.
For a week, at least.
The home plate was dug up, the pitcher’s mound flattened and the perimeter home run fence taken down within an hour after Puig’s Los Angeles Dodgers beat Goldschmidt’s Arizona Diamondbacks 7-5 on Sunday.
It was a two-game Dodgers’ sweep of Major League Baseball’s opening weekend at Sydney Cricket Ground.
The Dodgers and Clayton Kershaw won the Saturday opener 3-1, sending the Diamondbacks back to the US 0-2 to start the season and with the Dodgers holding a very early two-game lead in the NL West over their Arizona adversaries.
The regular season will resume next weekend for both teams, with a few exhibition games scheduled this week while they recover from jet lag after the 15-hour flights Down Under and back.
Meanwhile, the cricket ground, and Australian baseball fans, may never be the same.
Nearly 80,000 fans attended the weekend games at the 162-year-old ground in leafy Moore Park, minutes from downtown Sydney.
Clearly, sports-mad Australia loved having the world’s best baseball players in Sydney. So did their rugby, cricket, soccer and Aussie Rules football stars, who took time to mingle with Kershaw and Puig, among others, for photo shoots.
It was a mutual admiration society, with Kershaw posing on his birthday with a kangaroo and kicking around a rugby ball on the eve of his opener. Puig and Goldschmidt even tried their hand at cricket.
Cracker Jack and two-foot-long hotdogs became part of the menu at the SCG snack bars, and MLB commissioner Bud Selig was non-committal about a return to Australia in the near future.
Australian fans might like to see it sooner than later. Never were foul balls into the stands more heartily cheered, because they could keep them. In cricket, where balls are changed only after a predetermined amount of play, they must be returned to the field.
“This event was outstanding, really cool,” Diamondbacks manager Kirk Gibson said. “The crowds were great. The preparation from the city of Sydney was outstanding. They treated us well.”
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