The Rakuten Monkeys are the early season leaders in Taiwanese professional baseball after they swept their three-game series against the Fubon Guardians with a 3-1 victory in Taoyuan last night, showing their opponents that they can win in a pitching duel.
The defending champions have sustained their form from last year’s Taiwan Series triumph, the Monkeys’ third consecutive Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) title, after starting the season with five wins from five games.
Rakuten manager Tseng Hao-chu started second-year right-hander Weng Wei-chun to close out the series. Veteran pitcher Henry Sosa of the Dominican Republic took the mound for the Guardians.
Photo: CNA
The Monkeys got a run in the first inning and Fubon in their second to make the score 1-1 early on, before Weng settled down to limit the Guardians’ batters, while his teammates scored in the fifth and seventh.
Weng was taken out to leave the final frames to three Rakuten relievers, who pitched two scoreless innings.
Fubon put two runners on base with two outs in the final inning amid some shaky relief pitching and were a clutch hit from a win, but Rakuten closer Chen Yu-hsun — who has a record of giving up late runs and gave fans some tense moments, not least when he walked the first batter he pitched to — threw some heat to strike out Fubon shortstop Lee Chung-hsien to end the game.
Photo: CNA
Sosa, a former Houston Astros player who has had four stints with South Korean teams, was tagged with the loss, giving up seven hits and yielding three runs, two of them earned. He has a 1-1 record after one week of the season.
The Monkeys have undergone a big transition after a change of management at the end of last year, with the owners of the Lamigo club, as it was known, sold to Japanese online retailing giant Rakuten Inc, which also owns the Sendai-based Rakuten Golden Eagles, who play in Nippon Professional Baseball’s Pacific League.
Former Monkeys’ manager Hong Yi-chung signed a three-year contract with the Guardians last year, leaving the job to Tseng Hao-chu.
However, Rakuten have shown their resilience with a three-game sweep of Hong’s new team after slugfests in the first two contests. Rakuten won 11-10 on Friday and 12-9 on Saturday.
The performance might have boosted Rakuten’s global standing, as Taiwan is apparently the only nation with professional baseball in play amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The games are being streamed to global audiences, with fans in the US and Japan, elsewhere in Asia and Europe able to watch.
International fans said in comments on social media that they are enjoying the games and thanked Taiwan for providing sports amid lockdowns in their nations.
Online polls and Twitter comments showed that most newcomers had become fans of the high-scoring Rakuten Monkeys, with the Brothers a distant second.
In Taichung, the Uni-President Lions defeated the Chinatrust Brothers Baseball Club 7-4 after grabbing three runs in the eighth frame.
With that key rally, on a two-run homer by outfielder Lin An-ke, Lions starter Shih Tzu-chien chalked up his first win of the season.
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