Matt Shoemaker combined with four relievers on a four-hitter to upstage Shohei Otani, as the Major League Baseball All-Stars beat Japan 3-1 on Tuesday in the finale of their five-game series.
Shoemaker, who came second to Chicago White Sox first baseman Jose Abreu in American League Rookie of the Year voting, got the win by allowing two hits in five scoreless innings. Randy Choate, Tommy Hunter and Mark Melancon finished as the MLB All-Stars won the last two games of the series after a stuttering 0-3 start.
“You always want to go out there and put up zeroes,” Shoemaker said. “They have a lot of good hitters, scrappy guys and power guys, so you want to go out there and execute.”
Otani took the loss, giving up two runs and six hits in four innings with seven strikeouts.
The All-Stars went ahead 2-0 in the third when Lucas Duda doubled, advanced on Alcides Escobar’s single and, with Jose Altuve batting, scored on Motohiro Shima’s passed ball. Escobar came around on Altuve’s groundout.
“I got hit when I tried to get strikes,” Otani said. “That’s something I regret.”
The 20-year-old right-hander went 11-4 with 179 strikeouts and a 2.61 ERA this season for the Nippon Ham Fighters in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball League. Otani also plays in the outfield for the Fighters and hit .274 with 10 home runs and 31 RBIs in 87 games.
“He’s only 20, and he has a great arm,” Shoemaker said. “And I hear he also plays the outfield during the regular season, that’s a rare talent.”
The All-Stars made it 3-0 in the sixth when Altuve doubled, Yasiel Puig singled him to third and Eduardo Nunez had an RBI single.
Ryosuke Kikuchi tripled off Choate leading off the seventh and scored on Sho Nakata’s groundout against Hunter. Melancon pitched a one-hit ninth for the save.
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