The Lamigo Monkeys picked up where they left off on Saturday with a 5-0 win over the EDA Rhinos at the Cheng Ching Lake Baseball Stadium in Greater Kaohsiung last night to clinch the three-game weekend series.
Mitch Talbot kept his earned run average at a perfect 0 with seven shutout innings of two-hit ball to lift the Primates past their foes in one of the best efforts by a pitcher for the year.
The US righty, who joined the Monkeys right before the Aug. 31 deadline, showed why he was worth the wait by retiring the first 16 batters he faced to take a perfect game out into the sixth.
He lost the perfect game and the no-hitter bid with a single by Lan Hsao-bai in the sixth before giving up the second hit of the game to the Rhinos’ Chang Chien-ming to lead off the seventh.
However, the Rhinos never managed to put any man in scoring position as he promptly fanned the next two batters before inducing a fly out to left to strand the runner at first.
Even though the Rhinos finally placed runners in scoring position against Talbot’s successors, Hsu Ming-chieh and Huang Wei-sheng, with a pair of hits in the eighth and ninth respectively, they just could not come up with the timely hits necessary to break up the shutout, stranding two runners in each inning in the eventual shutout.
Offensively for the Primates, red-hot slugger Huang Hao-ran collected two hits for the second straight game with a pair RBIs to his credit to lead a lineup that ripped 13 hits off the Rhinos pitching.
Talbot was credited with his second win in as many starts, while the loss was charged to his counterpart Lai Hung-cheng, who allowed four runs on eight hits in four innings to remain winless at 0-3 for the season.
LIONS 2, BROTHERS 0
The Uni-President Lions also picked up an impressive road victory at the Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium last night with a 2-0 blanking of the Chinatrust Brothers to keep pace with the Lamigo Monkeys.
What should have been an easy win for the Lions against Brothers rookie righty Chiang Chung-cheng, who was making his professional debut, was anything but easy as Chiang matched Lions starter Shairon Martis pitch-for-pitch through the fifth in a scoreless affair.
However, things took a nasty dive south for the Brothers with Chiang’s exit after the fifth as reliever Romulo Sanchez ran into a world of trouble by serving up a leadoff homer to the Lions’ Liu Fu-hao in a two-run sixth that proved to be the difference in the game.
Picking up the win was Martis, who tossed three-hit ball over six effective innings for the win to beat Sanchez as the latter was tagged with the loss for serving up Liu’s game-winning blast.
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