Scoring early and often, the La New Bears baffled the Uni-President Lions in an 18-3 rout at the Kaohsiung County Baseball Stadium on Wednesday night to start the week with a bang.
The hosts roughed up Lions starter Hsu Yu-wei with five runs apiece in the first and second innings, highlighted by three-run blasts by Tseng Hao-jui and Chung Cheng-yo as the new bashing tandem for the Bears showed their former teammate with no mercy.
It did not matter who the Lions had on the mound, as the Bears showed off their big bats in the fourth against Lions reliever Cheng Bo-ren by sending 12 men to the plate to knock in a half-dozen more runs that made it 16-0 at that point.
The Lions finally got on the board in the top of the fifth against Bears starter Hsu Wen-hsiung when Chen Jung-hui rang up a double down the third-base line that scored the runner all the way from first.
By the time all was said and done, the Bears had tallied 18 runs on 16 hits that made a winner out of Hsu Wen-hsiung as the veteran righty finally beat the Lions for the first time in four years to snap an eight-game personal losing skid against the Cats, with the last win dating back to May 27, 2005.
Six Bears hitters had multi-hit games on the night, led by Tseng’s 2-for-4 outing with four RBIs and Pan Chung-wei’s 3-for-4 hitting with three RBIs.
BULLS 3, ELEPHANTS 2
An explosion on the part of Elephants starter Liu Yu-chan that led to four straight walks in a decisive fifth helped the Sinon Bulls overcome an early deficit to top the Brother Elephants 3-2 in Hualien on Tuesday night.
The win not only ended a four-game losing streak for the Bulls, but also nipped the Elephants’ four-game winning streak.
It was also the third straight Elephants game in which the final score stood at 3-2, only this time they were on the losing end.
Even though they outhit the Bulls by a wide 9-3 margin, the walks by Liu, totaling six over four-plus innings, proved costly as the Elephants failed to bail out their starter with just two runs scored against Sinon starter Lin Keh-chien, who won for the seventh time to raise his season mark to 7-4.
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