World Baseball Classic Pool A: China – Chinese Taipei 4-1
TPE 000 001 000 1 7 0 CHN 100 020 01X 4 9 0
About seven months after China celebrated its first victory ever against Taiwan in the Beijing Olympics, they repeated the feat on Saturday at the Tokyo Dome in Pool A of the 2009 World Baseball Classic. The 4-1 victory also eliminated Chinese Taipei from the competition, as they already lost their second game in the tournament. China now will face the loser of the Japan-Korea matchup on Sunday, aiming for another upset.
China had a perfect start into the important game. Fenglian Hou singled with one out in the bottom of the first period, advanced to third on a single by Ray Chang and scored on Fei Feng’s sacrifice fly. They extended the lead in the fifth frame through a RBI single by Hou and a RBI double by Chang. Taiwan cut the deficit to two runs in the top of the sixth on a Cheng-Ming Peng’s RBI single. But Chang crowned his great game with his third hit of the day in the eighth, a solo homerun to left field to seal the 4-1 win.
Chinese Taipei threatened to come back in the top of the ninth, bringing two runners in scoring position with two outs. But China’s closer Kun Chen recovered and got the final out on a groundball to shortstop Chang to finish the sensational win.
China’s starting pitcher Jiangang Lu (W 1-0) impressed with 5 1/3 strong innings, allowing four hits, one run and a base on balls, striking out two. 40 of his 71 pitches were strikes. On the other side Yueh-Ping Lin (L 0-1) gave up four hits, three runs and a walk in 4 2/3 innings.
It is already a stellar performance by the Chinese team. Three years ago they were heavily overmatched in the three round robin games of the World Baseball Classic. In this edition they only lost by a score of 0-4 against Japan and now even got their first win.
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