The Chinatrust Brothers opened the 2015 Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) season on a high note with an impressive 7-3 win over defending champions the Lamigo Monkeys on the road at the Taoyuan International Baseball Stadium last night.
The rematch of last season’s Taiwan Series that saw the Primates dominate the Brothers was all Brothers in the early going, as the visitors needed only 10 at-bats against Lamigo starter Jared Lansford to plate their first run of the season when Chou Si-chi led off the top of the second with a single up the middle and scored two batters later on Jaime Pedroza lining single to shallow-left.
Chinatrust doubled their lead an inning later when team captain Lin Wei-chu led off the inning with another single off Lansford and took home two batters later on a Jim Negrych RBI double that made it 2-0.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
Neither team scored over the next inning until the home hosts finally broke through against the stellar pitching of Chinatrust starter Cheng Kai-wen, who surrendered a leadoff single to the Monkeys’ Lin Chih-sheng in the bottom of the sixth before serving up a long ball to Lin “Chubby Kid” Hung-yu for a game-tying two-run homer that evened things up at 2-all.
The home crowd only had less than an inning to celebrate their team’s brief comeback, as the Brother bats went to work again by batting around the order against reliever Huang Wei-sheng, who was tagged for five runs (four runs) to claim a 7-2 advantage.
Trailing by five, the Primates managed to get one of the runs back in the bottom of the inning, but that was all the runs they could muster with the Brother bullpen doing its job with a scoreless eighth and ninth to preserve the win for Cheng.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
The two teams will do battle again in Taoyuan this afternoon, while the Uni-President Lions open their season against the EDA Rhinos at home at the Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium this afternoon.
The Rakuten Monkeys on Sunday downed the CTBC Brothers 2-1, handing the hosts their second consecutive loss in the best-of-seven CPBL Taiwan Series at the Taipei Dome. Monkeys’ ace starter Pedro Fernandez of the Dominican Republic dominated on the mound, cruising through six scoreless innings before giving up a run on a wild pitch in the bottom of the seventh inning. He gave up only three hits and walked two batters in a 93-pitch outing, giving his Taoyuan-based team an edge. Offensively, the Monkeys’ leadoff batter Lin Li hit Brothers starter Brandon Leibrandt’s pitch over the center-field wall in the game’s first at-bat,
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