Avenging a disappointing loss from the night before, the La New Bears humbled the Brother Elephants in a 10-4 final at the Kaohsiung County Baseball Stadium on Saturday night to nip a two-game losing skid.
After failing to protect a late-game lead on Friday, the rambunctious home Bears returned to the field with revenge on their minds.
And that was enough for them to thwart the visiting Elephants with seven runs over the first two frames, highlighted by Chen Chin-fong’s two-run blast off Elephants reliever Lee Hao-ren in the second for his second homer of the season.
PHOTO: CHANG CHUNG-YI, TAIPEI TIMES
Also starring with his second long ball of the year for the Bears was slugger Lin Chih-sheng, who tattooed a belt-high fastball from the Elephants’ Liu Yu-chan in the fourth to give his team a 9-2 lead.
On the mound for the Bears with six-and-two-thirds of decent pitching was starter Chang Chih-jia, who allowed four runs on eight hits while fanning four and walking a pair to earn his first win of the season.
As for the Elephants, failure to come up with timely hits cost them the game as they tied the Bears at nine hits but only managed to produce four runs in the process.
BULLS 4, LIONS 4
Chang Jien-ming’s triple in the eighth inning with a runner on second scored the game-tying run for the Sinon Bulls against the Uni-President Lions and that was how it ended as the two clubs took the game all the way through the 12th to settle with a rare tie in Tainan on Saturday evening.
The showdown in the South between the top-ranked Bulls and the defending champs saw the two squads trading a run each during the first two innings.
The Bulls skidded ahead by two runs in the top of the fifth on back-to-back RBI-singles by Hsieh “the Ugly” Jia-shien and Cheng Da-hong to lead it 3-1.
However, the home cats responded in the bottom of the same inning by getting one of the two runs back on Chen Lien-hong’s liner to left and eventually took a 4-3 lead of their own in the sixth to set the table for Chang’s game-tying triple.
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