Trouble continued for the Chinatrust Brother Elephants yesterday as they dropped a pair of games in a day-night doubleheader against the top-ranked Lamigo Monkeys at the Hualien County Baseball Stadium to stretch their losing streak to six straight.
Failure to protect a multirun lead on two separate occasions was to blame in the day game, in which the men in their golden uniforms lost by a run in a 6-5 final as starter Cheng Kai-wen surrendered three in the fateful sixth that turned a 4-2 lead into a 5-4 deficit.
The Primates tacked on another run in the seventh that proved critical, as the Elephants managed to plate a run in the bottom of the eighth that made it a one-run game before closer Miguel Mejia tossed a scoreless ninth, despite the Elephants loading up the bases, to preserve the win for starter Ken Ray.
MONKEYS 3, ELEPHANTS 0
In the night game in Hualien, the highly anticipated pitchers’ duel between the Elephants’ Chen Hung-wen and the Monkeys’ Wang Yi-cheng lived up to its billing as the two hurlers kept it a scoreless affair through six, before the Monkeys finally broke through in the top of the seventh on a sacrifice fly by Yu The-lung to break the ice.
Yu’s seventh-inning heroics preceded Chen Guan-ren’s RBI double in the eighth against Chen’s former club that made it 2-0, before the visitors cashed in on an error by the Elephants defense in the ninth that made it 3-0.
The only scoring chance the Elephants had against Wang came in the sixth, when they had runner at the corners with two outs before Wang stranded both with an inning-ending strikeout.
That set up a scoreless eighth from Monkeys setup man Chen Yu-hsun before Mejia retired the side in order in the ninth with his fifth straight save to preserve the shutout win for Wang.
LIONS 6, RHINOS 3
Deng Chih-wei and Kao Guo-ching drove in a pair of runs each to back up a solid effort by Pan “Dudu” Wei-luen on the mound as the Uni-President Lions doubled up on the EDA Rhinos in a 6-3 final at the Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium last night.
The bashing tandem gave Rhinos starter and former major leaguer Freddy Garcia a rude welcome in his second start in Taiwan as they went a combined 4-for-6 with four RBIs, including a solo homer by Deng in the bottom of the fifth, to chase the newest addition to the Rhino rotation after five innings.
Dudu was credited with his first win in just his second start of the season for holding the Rhinos hitters scoreless over seven frames on as many hits.
Freddie Freeman homered and drove in four runs, Shohei Ohtani also went deep and Roki Sasaki earned his first major league win as the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Atlanta Braves 10-3 on Saturday night for their seventh straight victory. The Dodgers have won the first two games of the series to improve to 5-0 against Atlanta this year. Los Angeles’ three-game sweep at home early in the season left the Braves 0-7. Sasaki allowed three runs and six hits over five innings. The 23-year-old right-hander gave up a home run to Ozzie Albies, but received plenty of offensive support in his
FOCUS: ‘We came out here with a goal in mind ... to keep our foot on their throat and on their neck, and continue to play 48 minutes of basketball,’ Donovan Mitchell said The Cleveland Cavaliers on Monday thrashed the Miami Heat to cruise into the next round of the NBA playoffs as the Golden State Warriors battled past the Houston Rockets 109-106 to move to the brink of a series victory. After pounding Miami 124-87 in game three on Saturday, No.1 Eastern Conference seeds Cleveland once again piled on the misery for their outclassed opponents with a crushing 138-83 victory to complete a 4-0 series win. The 55-point drubbing was the largest series-clinching victory in NBA playoff history and sets up a series against either the Indiana Pacers or Milwaukee Bucks in
Shuttler Lin Chun-yi yesterday kept Taiwan on the board as they faced their first major challenge of the group stage after marching into the last eight at the Sudirman Cup Finals in Xiamen, China. Taiwan were losing 3-1 to South Korea as of press time last night, with only the men’s doubles match remaining. Taiwan and four-time champions South Korea have already progressed to the quarter-finals, after Taiwan on Monday blanked the Czech Republic 5-0 without giving up a single game. Before last night’s tie, Taiwan were undefeated in Group B, with a 9-1 match record, ahead of South Korea, who, although also
A man fell from the 6.4m-high Clemente Wall in right field at PNC Park in Pittsburgh during Wednesday night’s game between the Pirates and the Chicago Cubs. Right after Andrew McCutchen hit a two-run double in the seventh inning to put the Pirates ahead 4-3, players began waving frantically for medical personnel and pointing to the man, who had fallen onto the warning track. The fan was tended to for approximately five minutes by members of both the Pirates and Cubs training staffs as well as PNC personnel before being removed from the field on a cart. The team issued a statement shortly