The visiting teams made themselves feel right at home on Sunday with a pair of road sweeps in the Chinese Professional League as the Chinatrust Whales topped the Sinon Bulls 4-3 in Chiayi and the dmedia T-Rex outduked the La New Bears 6-4 in Kaohsiung.
With the bases loaded and his team hanging on to a 4-3 lead, Whales closer Huang Hong-ren calmly got the Bulls’ Chang Jia-hao to ground out to second and end the game, thus preserving a well-deserved win for Shen Yu-jeh, who shook off two straight poor starts by pitching three-hit ball over eight-plus innings.
Unlike the final score suggests, the Bulls struck first in the bottom of the first with two first-inning runs off Shen on an RBI-double by Huang Chung-yi and a sacrifice-fly by Cheng Jau-han.
Those turned out to be the only runs they would score through the eighth before rallying for their third run in the ninth to give the Whales a slight scare.
Offensively for the marine creatures, Lee Yi-wei’s run-scoring double off Bulls starter Iba Tomokazu following Wang Yi-min’s RBI-single capped a three-run fourth that brought Chinatrust from two down to lead it 3-2.
Kuo Yong-chih’s wild throw to second on what could have been a 1-6-3 double play ended up placing runners on first and second, which gave the Whales a chance to score an insurance run on Carlos Villalobos’ sacrifice-fly in the top of the ninth.
And that made all the difference as the Bulls pulled within a run by scoring once more in the bottom of the ninth before Huang Hong-ren got the final out to preserve the win.
“It was a big win for us considering that we haven’t been playing too well as of late, but hopefully all that will be behind us now,” Whales manager Hsieh Chang-hen said after the game. His team has quietly won four of their last five after dropping 10 of their previous dozen to slide down as far as fifth place in the standings.
T-Rex 6, Bears 4
The dmedia T-Rex scored three unanswered runs in the top of the ninth to turn a 3-4 deficit into a series-sweeping 6-4 win in Kaohsiung on Sunday night, thanks to a clutch hit by game-MVP Chen Yuan-jia that scored the game-winner.
Kuo Ming-ren also starred with a pair of doubles and an RBI to improve his season average to .350.
Chen Chih-peng’s run-scoring single broke a scoreless tie for the T-Rex in the top of the third before the home Bears countered with two runs of their own two innings later on Yu Jin-deh’s RBI-groundout and Tsai Jien-wei’s one-run single up the middle.
Trailing 1-2, the T-Rex answered with two runs in the top of the sixth to reclaim a 3-2 advantage, only to see the Bears return the favor in the bottom of the same inning on a run-scoring wild pitch by dmedia reliever Leovildo Pargas and Chen Fong-min’s RBI-single that made it 4-3 in favor of the Bears to set the stage for the T-Rex’s ninth-inning rally.
Picking up his league-leading fifth win of the season was dmedia reliever Lai Jung-nan, who entered in the eighth and tossed two shutout innings to beat his counterpart Huang Chin-chih, who blew a save opportunity by allowing two of the T-Rex’s three runs in the ninth in his first loss of the season.
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