Trouble continued for the Chinatrust Brother Elephants yesterday as they dropped a pair of games in a day-night doubleheader against the top-ranked Lamigo Monkeys at the Hualien County Baseball Stadium to stretch their losing streak to six straight.
Failure to protect a multirun lead on two separate occasions was to blame in the day game, in which the men in their golden uniforms lost by a run in a 6-5 final as starter Cheng Kai-wen surrendered three in the fateful sixth that turned a 4-2 lead into a 5-4 deficit.
The Primates tacked on another run in the seventh that proved critical, as the Elephants managed to plate a run in the bottom of the eighth that made it a one-run game before closer Miguel Mejia tossed a scoreless ninth, despite the Elephants loading up the bases, to preserve the win for starter Ken Ray.
MONKEYS 3, ELEPHANTS 0
In the night game in Hualien, the highly anticipated pitchers’ duel between the Elephants’ Chen Hung-wen and the Monkeys’ Wang Yi-cheng lived up to its billing as the two hurlers kept it a scoreless affair through six, before the Monkeys finally broke through in the top of the seventh on a sacrifice fly by Yu The-lung to break the ice.
Yu’s seventh-inning heroics preceded Chen Guan-ren’s RBI double in the eighth against Chen’s former club that made it 2-0, before the visitors cashed in on an error by the Elephants defense in the ninth that made it 3-0.
The only scoring chance the Elephants had against Wang came in the sixth, when they had runner at the corners with two outs before Wang stranded both with an inning-ending strikeout.
That set up a scoreless eighth from Monkeys setup man Chen Yu-hsun before Mejia retired the side in order in the ninth with his fifth straight save to preserve the shutout win for Wang.
LIONS 6, RHINOS 3
Deng Chih-wei and Kao Guo-ching drove in a pair of runs each to back up a solid effort by Pan “Dudu” Wei-luen on the mound as the Uni-President Lions doubled up on the EDA Rhinos in a 6-3 final at the Tainan Municipal Baseball Stadium last night.
The bashing tandem gave Rhinos starter and former major leaguer Freddy Garcia a rude welcome in his second start in Taiwan as they went a combined 4-for-6 with four RBIs, including a solo homer by Deng in the bottom of the fifth, to chase the newest addition to the Rhino rotation after five innings.
Dudu was credited with his first win in just his second start of the season for holding the Rhinos hitters scoreless over seven frames on as many hits.
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