Osvaldo Martinez silenced the President Lions' bats and the 11,000-plus hostile Tainan crowd with 6-2/3 innings of near-flawless pitching as the Sinon Bulls won Game 2 of the Taiwan Series by a final score of 3-1 on Sunday night.
The road win gave the Bulls a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven championship series against the first half champions and set what many had thought to be the closest postseason matchup play in league history into a potential blowout heading into tonight's Game 3 in Taichung, where over 15,000 rowdy Bulls' fans await the hapless Lions.
Despite his mediocre regular season record against the big cats (1-2 with a 6.10 ERA in two starts and seven relief appearances), Martinez took his game to another level by four-hitting the Lions with six strikeouts in 6-2/3 frames of work.
Except for Lions' third baseman Wu Jia-rong (
He would have had the shutout if it were not for a pitch that sailed wide in the bottom of the first which scored the runner from third for the Lions' only run of the game.
Equally stunning compared to Martinez's lead act was Bulls reliever Jeff Andra's 2-1/3 innings of perfect relief.
The American righty followed his two innings of hitless relief in Game 1 with another spectacular outing by retiring all seven batters he faced for his second straight save in as many games.
Lions' brief lead
Taking advantage of Martinez's first-inning wild pitch, the Lions actually took an early 1-0 lead until the top of the fourth, when Bulls' designated hitter Tseng Hua-wei (曾華偉) knotted the game up at 1-1 with a sharp grounder that shot through the left gap of a drawn-in Lions' infield to score the runner from third.
Cleanup man Chang "Prince of the Forest" Tai-shan (
With his three hits in the game, Chang took over the top spot in most career championship series hits with 44 and counting, surpassing Lions' designated hitter Luo Ming-ching's (
Luo will probably need to play a whale of a game in the remaining contests of the series if he wishes to retake the record from Chang, since the Lions' all-time "hitting king" will retire after this season.
Right-hander Pan "Du Du" Wei-luen (
"Pan definitely pitched well enough to win; I am not too concerned with our pitching," Lions skipper Hsieh Chang-hern (
The former Lions' pitching icon, who led the Lions to four titles in his playing days during the 1990s, will try to rally his troops for Game 3.
Only one team has been able to overcome a 0-2 series deficit to win the title in the 11 championship series thus far.
In a year that is filled with broken curses and history-defying plays, the Lions may be the club that will prove history wrong.
A seven-year-old horse had to be euthanized on Friday after breaking its back on the final fence of a Grand National steeplechase race that it won despite sustaining the serious injury. It follows the death of four horses at the Cheltenham Festival last month — including one after the prestigious Gold Cup. Gold Dancer was competing in the Mildmay Novices’ Chase during Ladies Day at Aintree’s Grand National Festival. The horse managed to cross the finish line approximately four lengths ahead of runner-up Regent’s Stroll. “The winner of our second race of the day, Gold Dancer, was pulled up after
“I don’t remember the moment, but ever since I was a kid, that’s the first thing I loved,” two-time NBA All-Star Isaiah Thomas said of his lifelong romance with basketball. However, that journey unfolded against the limitations of his size in a game where height often dictates opportunity — a reality he confronted throughout his career. At 175cm, Thomas is less than 2cm taller than the average Taiwanese adult male, while NBA players during his career stood at about 200cm on average. Compared with the NBA’s average career length of less than five years, Thomas’ 13-season career stands out as
Hans Niemann declares he would become a “stone cold killer” in a Netflix documentary released on Tuesday about his feud with five-time classical world champion Magnus Carlsen, a pledge that injects new edge into the lingering fallout from the cheating scandal that shook elite chess. “I’m gonna be a stone cold killer the rest of my life,” the US’ Niemann says in the film. “I’m going to become the best player in the world, and no one is going to believe that now, but this clip will play over and over again in 10 years — just wait.” “I just
Dakar and Rabat have longstanding ties, but relations have been strained since the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) final, which Senegal won in mid-January before being stripped of the title, which was transferred to Morocco. Now, the AFCON trophy is something of a thorn in the two countries’ sides. On Rue Mohamed V, the street where Moroccan vendors are based in the Senegalese capital, a police van is parked. “The police have been on high alert since the Confederation of African Football [CAF] decided to award the title to Morocco, but there have been no incidents,” a local resident said.
RSS