Teeing off against the opposing pitching with a season-high 23 hits, the Uni-President Lions roughed up the Lamigo Monkeys in a 21-0 shutout at the Taoyuan International Baseball Stadium last night to even the weekend series at one win apiece.
The win not only avenged a 3-0 shutout by the Monkeys against the Lions the night before, but also put the Monkeys on notice that the top-ranked Cats are not to be messed with in any way.
Starter Yuya Kamada was nearly perfect off the mound as he took a no-hitter one out into the seventh, before the home Monkeys’ Kuo Wei-sho beat out a soft roller to second for an infield single to break up the Japanese ace’s bid for the league’s first no-hitter this year.
Kuo’s single proved to be the lone hit that the Primates collected on the night, as Kamada cruised through the eighth unharmed with a season-high 11 strikeouts, before reliever Huang Chih-long retired the final three batters in order in the ninth to preserve the masterpiece for the righty from the land of the samurais.
Kamada is now 9-0 with a miniscule earned run average of 1.45, leading the league in both pitching statistical categories by a mile, compared with the next-best hurler.
Doing the damage at the plate for the visiting Cats were Kao Guo-ching and Deng Chih-wei, who both homered and combined for nine RBIs on the night in a total offensive explosion. All but one of the Lions starting lineup had at least one hit, with seven of them having multi-hit games.
What had been a pitchers’ duel through the fourth between Kamada and the Monkeys’ Leonard DiNardo turned into a massacre, with the Lions sending 14 hitters to the plate to knock in nine runs that blew a 1-0 score wide open at 10-0.
By the time the Lions were done with their bats in the ninth, the Monkeys had gone through a half-dozen pitchers on a night in which their pitches looked larger than a softball to the Lions hitters, who found more ways to drive the ball past the Monkeys defenders than one could ever imagine.
Bologna on Thursday advanced past Empoli to reach their first Coppa Italia final in more than half a century. Thijs Dallinga’s 87th-minute header earned Bologna a 2-1 win and his side advanced 5-1 on aggregate. Giovanni Fabbian opened the scoring for Bologna with a header seven minutes in. Then Viktor Kovalenko equalized for Empoli in the 30th minute by turning in a rebound to finish off a counterattack. Bologna won the first leg 3-0. In the May 14 final in Rome, Bologna are to face AC Milan, who eliminated city rivals Inter 4-1 on aggregate following a 3-0 win on Wednesday. Bologna last reached the
If the Wild finally break through and win their first playoff series in a decade, Minnesota’s top line likely will be the reason. They were all over the Golden Knights through the first two games of their NHL Western Conference quarter-finals series, which was 1-1 going back to Minnesota for Game 3 today. The Wild tied the series with a 5-2 win on Tuesday. Matt Boldy had three goals and an assist in the first two games, while Kirill Kaprizov produced two goals and three assists. Joel Eriksson Ek, who centers the line, has yet to get on the scoresheet. “I think the biggest
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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