Scoring three quick runs in the first inning, the Brother Elephants struck early against the Sinon Bulls and held on to garner a 4-3 road win at the Taichung Intercontinental Baseball Stadium last night.
The win not only brought the Elephants to within a half-game of the top-ranked Lamigo Monkeys for the second-half title with two games remaining in the regular season, but more importantly it kept their title hopes alive as they looked to finish out the season strong.
Trailing the Monkeys by a game heading into last night’s contest, the Elephants were on the verge of elimination if they could not come up with a win since a loss would set them back a game-and-a-half behind the idled Monkeys with two games remaining.
And a win was exactly what they mustered as they pounded three doubles and a single off Luo Cheng-long for a quick 3-0 lead that chased the Sinon rookie starter before he could even register an out and survived a nerve-wracking ninth to keep the win intact.
Down 4-2 to start the home half of the ninth, the Bulls led off with an opposite-field single by Lin Cuen-sheng off Elephants closer Lee Fong-hua.
Sinon scored a run on the merit of two singles one out later to place runners on first and second in what seemed a golden scoring opportunity.
However, the bend-but-not-break Elephants rose to the occasion as Lee recorded a key strikeout on a called third strike against the Bulls’ Hsu Guo-long for the second out of the inning, before the veteran right-hander retired Sinon’s Fang Keh-wei with a nasty 2-2 slider that Fang swung right through to strand a pair of runners for the win.
“That was as big a strikeout as I’ve seen in a long time,” Elephants skipper Chen Rei-chen said after the game about Lee’s clutch performance.
Peng “Chia Chia” Cheng-min’s second-inning sacrifice fly, which gave his team a 4-1 lead at that point, proved critical for the Elephants, as it gave them just enough margin to outlast a brilliant relief effort by the Bulls bullpen that held the Elephants scoreless from the third inning on.
Elephants starter Tyler Lumsden was credited with the win to even his season mark at 10-10, allowing two runs on six hits over 5-1/3 innings of work, while the loss went to his counterpart Luo in his shortest start of the season.
College basketballer Kaitlyn Chen has become the first female player of Taiwanese descent to be drafted by a WNBA team, after the Golden State Valkyries selected her in the third and final round of the league’s draft on Monday. Chen, a point guard who played her first three seasons in college for Princeton University, transferred to the University of Connecticut (UConn) for her final season, which culminated in a national championship earlier this month. While at Princeton, Chen was named the Ivy League tournament’s most outstanding player three times from 2022 to last year. Prior to the draft, ESPN described Chen as
Robinson Cano spent 17 seasons playing in the MLB in front of all kinds of baseball fans, but he said there is something special about his stint with the Mexican Baseball League’s Diablos Rojos. He is not alone. The league last week opened its 100th season, aiming to keep an impressive growth in attendance that began after the national team’s surprise run at the 2023 World Baseball Classic, and is already surpassing some first-division soccer clubs. After finishing third in the 2023 tournament, many casual fans, some of them soccer enthusiasts disappointed after Mexico were eliminated in the first round in the 2022
Noelvi Marte on Sunday had seven RBIs and hit his first career grand slam with a drive off infielder Jorge Mateo, while Austin Wynn had a career-high six RBIs as the Cincinnati Reds scored their most runs in 26 years in a 24-2 rout of the Baltimore Orioles. Marte finished with five hits, including his eighth-inning homer off Mateo. Wynn hit a three-run homer in the ninth off catcher Gary Sanchez. Cincinnati scored its most runs since a 24-12 win against the Colorado Rockies on May 19, 1999, and finished with 25 hits. Baltimore allowed its most runs since a 30-3 loss to
Arne Slot has denied that Darwin Nunez was dropped from Liverpool’s win against West Ham because of a training-ground row with a member of his coaching staff. The Liverpool head coach on Sunday last week said that Nunez was absent from the 2-1 victory at Anfield, having felt unwell during training the day before, although the striker sat behind the substitutes throughout the game. Speculation has been rife that the Uruguay international, whom Slot criticized for his work rate against Wolves and Aston Villa in February, was left out for disciplinary reasons. Asked on Friday to clarify the situation, Slot said: “He
RSS