With the opening round of WBC play only a few days away, the NT endured a crushing loss to the Seibu Lions, 13-2 in its last warmup match.
Bright spots for the NT? Chih-Hsien Chiang hit a 2-run HR in the 5th inning to account for all of the NT's runs. Che-Hsuan Lin and Yi-Chuan Lin both managed 3 hits each. As a whole, the team actually outhit the Lions 14-13.
Defensively, the team committed 2 errors in the field.
As for the pitching, the staff got roughed up for 13 runs on 13 hits:
Starter Yueh-Ping Lin gave up 5 runs in 3 innings (including a solo HR in the 3rd).
Kai-Wen Cheng threw 2 scoreless innings.
Yu-Cheng Liao was charged with 4 runs in 0.1 innings.
Po-Hsuan Keng threw 1.2 scoreless innings
Hong-Wen Chen gave up 4 runs in 1.1 innings (including a 2-run HR in the 9th).
Po-Yu Lin pitched the last 2/3 of the 9th inning, allowing no runs.
For the Lions, Ming-Chieh Hsu threw 3 shutout innings (7th, 8th, and 9th) to close out the game for his team.
Line Score/Play-By-Play (in Japanese)
Recap 1
Recap 2
*Updated
The NT opens pool A play against South Korea on Friday. The game will be carried by ESPN2 at 1:30 AM Pacific. To miraculously advance to round 2 in San Diego, the NT will need to win 2 games in the first round - a tall order considering how the team fared in all of its warm up matches.
*ST:
CL Hu was 0-1 with a run scored as the Dodgers beat the Padres 5-4. Box
YC Chen was 1-2 with a double and a run scored as the A's lost to the Cubs 6-4. Box
*Updated
3 comments:
it seems that the uni-lions that went to the Konami Cup may be better than our current NT. The Seibu Lions barely beat them with some very controversial bottom of the 9th calls from the ump. If our NT is this bad in its current state than whats the point? we may as well just send the Uni-lions. isnt the NT supposed to be the cream of the crop? Considering that the Japanese NT has got both Dice-K and Ichiro + top tier NPB, we couldve atleast gotten Kuo. We dont even have our top CPBL players for gods sake
The timing of the WBC doesn't help at all. Most of our top young prospects are all fighting to impress in ST (Hu, YC Chen, CS Yang) while the injury bug has prevented our most established ML and NPB players (CMW, Kuo, EY Lin, WY Chen)and other key minor leaguers (KH Lo, YJ Hsiao) from competing in this event.
Couple that with the fact that two of the top players in the CPBL (CFC and WL Pan) as well as their teammates have been held back from the competition, and this is what Coach Yeh is left to deal with. The team just doesn't have the established depth of other top countries.
We are definitely the underdogs here.... if our team can pull out a few upsets I will be pleasantly surprised but im not expecting too much. If we struggle against China I wouldnt be surprised either. I feel bad for Coach Yeh - giving basically nothing to work with
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