EDA Rhinos slugger Lin Yi-chuan set a new Taiwanese professional baseball record over the weekend, reaching the 1,000-hit mark in the fewest games and with the fewest appearances at the plate.
Lin hit a single in the sixth inning to become the fastest player to get 1,000 hits during his side’s encounter with the Chinatrust Brothers at his home park in Kaohsiung on Saturday night.
It took him 744 games and 3,168 at-bats to accomplish the feat, which broke the previous fastest marks of 837 games by Lin Chih-sheng of the Lamigo Monkeys and 3,469 at-bats by Peng Cheng-min of the Chinatrust Brothers.
The left-handed Lin Yi-chuan, dubbed “One Punch” by fans, also goes into the record books as the 16th CPBL player to join the 1,000-hit club.
The EDA Rhinos rely on first baseman Lin to fire up their offense, as he not only hits the best average, but is also a home run threat.
Lin Yi-chuan’s next goal is trying to top the 100-homer hurdle this year, since he has accumulated 92 career round-trippers so far, 15 of them this season.
Breaking into CPBL with the Sinon Bulls in 2009, Lin Yi-chuan quickly made a big impact by winning both the Rookie of the Year and the league’s Most Valuable Player awards, after 169 hits, 113 RBIs, 18 home runs and a .348 batting average.
Through the past six seasons he has always surpassed the 100-hit mark and has been among the leaders in RBIs, home runs and batting average.
His wife and family members were on hand to witness the accomplishment on Saturday, but the Rhinos could not cap the achievement with a win as they were blanked 4-0 by the Brothers.
“It’s a great feeling to set a new league hits record, but unfortunately our team still lost tonight. I cannot relax and must stay focused to get winning results, because our team has the goal of taking the second-half title,” Lin Yi-chuan said after the game.
In Friday’s contest, the Brothers edged the Rhinos 6-5 at Kaohsiung’s Cheng Ching Lake Baseball Stadium.
Their game on Sunday was washed out by rain and has been rescheduled to a later date.
The Brothers’ streak of hitting home runs was stopped at 15 games on Thursday last week.
In the other CPBL matchup over the weekend, the slumping Uni-President Lions finally woke up from their malaise when they swept the series against the Lamigo Monkeys.
The Monkeys could not contain the roaring Lions, as they prevailed 8-7 and 8-5 on Friday and Saturday respectively.
The series finale saw the Lions batters knock around the Monkeys’ pitchers for 20 hits, coasting to a 16-4 triumph at the Tianmu Baseball Stadium in Taipei on Sunday.
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