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Monday, December 04, 2006

Narrow Win Versus Cross-Straits Rival....

Tseng - Winning Pitcher


Taiwan pulled out a tight 4-2 win over China on Monday. China, who was crushed a day earlier by Japan 16-0, managed to keep things fairly even with the Taiwanese team. Taiwan would score first in the 2nd inning on a solo HR by Tai-Shan Chang. China would strike back and tie things up on a sac-fly in the top of the 3rd. Taiwan would then retake the lead in the bottom of the inning by adding 2 more runs thanks to a Yung-Chi Chen triple and a WP/error committed by the Chinese squad. Sung-Wei Tseng, who pitched a great game - throwing 7 innings, allowing 2 runs on 8 hits to go along with 8 K's and 2 walks, gave up a solo HR in the 7th inning to make things interesting. Leading by only one, C.F. Chen would blast a clutch leadoff solo blast in the 8th inning to give us a lil more breathing room and give us our final score 4-2.


The 2-run win continues a disturbing recent trend where the Chinese NT continues to give the Taiwanese NT a much closer game than anticipated. I will assume that we shake off this game and handily beat the RP NT tomorrow. That sets up the showdown with Japan for the gold medal on Thursday. The Japanese team, despite their amateur/industrial league status, is talented as evidenced by several members of the team being selected fairly high in the recent NPB draft. Matchup wise, if Kuo is available to pitch on Thursday, then the game should be a low scoring affair for the most part. The wild card will be the Japanese pitching staff - if they can hold down our hitters, then the winner of this game is anyone's guess.

Box Score
PlayByPlay

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I heard the Korean umpire was accused of cheating. He would call many of Tsengs throws unfairly and was alot more lenient with the Chinese pitcher. did you anything about this?

Anonymous said...

what is an industrial league? Is that like the softball team at work?

Anonymous said...

industrial league is an independent league. not part of the minor league system but serves the same purpose. the players there are usually playing at a lower level than the "nigun" teams. a bit better than the softball team at work.

Anonymous said...

the ump was a bit weird. he called a few strikes for china that were at shoulder height.

then again it's stupid how la new easily beat the same team just 2 weeks ago by a margin of 10 while the NT made this game look so difficult.

Anonymous said...

There were speculations that the Korean umpire had the intention to influence the outcome of the game so that South Korean NT would get "another crack" at "winning the silver medal".

Not to bash South Koreans, but this is not the first time they're being accused of doing shady things against Taiwan to save face in a baseball event. Aparently it's not OK for South Korea to lose to Taiwan because they will only admit that they're second to Japan in baseball in the far east region.

National pride is a good thing, but it's shameful when you're willing to attain it at the expense of proper sportsmanship and ethics.

Anonymous said...

so true, i remember reading about a baseball tourny in south korea which our boys were invited to. It was a 13 and under tourny i believe and our boys ended up beating all the Korean teams and we made it to the finals. But, we were sent home because they claimed that only a korean team was allowed to win the championship. of course our boys were pretty pissed about that. Anyway, national pride caused a rather negative view of the south koreans for our boys. The organizations nationalism shouldnt get in the way of potential friendship. heres the article if you wanna see it

http://www.occidentalism.org/?p=326