November 30, 2006
Doha Round Robin
The South Korean press is pessimistic about the team's chances in the Asian games after they lose the opening game to Taiwan:
South Korea's hope to take the third straight baseball title at the Asian Games tumbled on Thursday as it lost 4-2 to Taiwan in what was regarded as the virtual final of the six-country competition in Doha, Qatar.
In their opener of the Doha Games held at the Al-Rayyan stadium, Chen Yung-chi hit two single homers and LA Dodgers pitcher Kuo Hung-chih held five innings to one run for Taiwan to outdo the favorite Korea. Son Min-han took the loss after allowing three runs on five hits, including two homers over 4 1/3 innings.
It appears difficult for Korea, winner of the Bangkok and Pusan Games, to win the round-robin competition even after winning the rest of the matches. As Japan is comprised mostly of amateur players and regarded a notch below the two countries, Taiwan is likely to beat the other participants including the Philippines, Thailand and China.
I wonder why they're playing in Qatar when all the teams are from East Asia? It's good they're trying to spread the game west, but it must make for tough viewing back home.
All the Asian Games events this year are in Doha; kind of like the Olympics, where all the events are at the same location (ish).
Thanks, Alfred, I thought it was just a baseball tournament.
Taiwan always have a knack of making it really close with Korea though, even in the WBC this year where Korea clearly send the better team (Taiwan was without Chien Ming Wang, and Hong Chi Kuo was still not the guy he is now, and they missed a few key bats too) while Korea had it's dream team. and taiwan still made it a close game.
It really shouldn't come as a huge surprise that Taiwan won, considering that they started Hong Chih Kuo and had NPB pitch Chien Ming Jiang relieve him. and had several near MLB level hitters in Yung Chi Chen, and former Dodger's prospect Chin-Fung Chen.
China is still pretty weak in baseball, the La-New bears crushed almost the identical team they send to the Asian gamse in the Konami cup just a couple of weeks back. and that was a single team in the relatively weak CPBL league of Taiwan.
and China is still eons better than Phillipines/Thailand, go figure. niether TW/KR/JP should lose any games to teams outside of themself. or really even play full 9 innings against them (seen as the Japanese vs PHI game was called after 5 innings 17:2 :P)
