Foto tomada de Jit
Havana, Nov 16 (RHC) Cuba defeated Australia 4-3 on Saturday at the Tianmu Baseball Stadium in Taipei, and got its first win in the III Premier 12 baseball tournament, attended by the top-ranked countries in the world.
After losing to the Dominican Republic and South Korea, the team led by Armando Johnson put together an 11-strikeout attack to defeat their rivals and keep alive their hopes of reaching the super round, where the medals will be shared.
The Australians took starter Dario Sarduy off the mound in the very first chapter after scoring a couple of runs with four singles, but the West Indians scored a few minutes later against starter Tim Atherton after hitting three hits, one of them an RBI by Yoelquis Guibert.
In the second act, on a delivery from reliever Blake Townsed, Yadir Drake, who had already hit a single in the opening episode, disappeared the ball over the pads with two teammates on base, to give his team a lead that they defended for the rest of the game.
Opening the fifth, Robbie Glendinning narrowed the score with a solo blast against the winner Andy Vargas, who signed another good rescue of three and two-thirds innings with five strikeouts to reach 10 and equal with the tournament leaders.
That was all the defeated team could do, dominated for two innings by Frank Abel Álvarez, by his substitute Leodan Reyes who got five outs and by the leader in saves of the Pacific League in Japanese baseball, Raidel Martínez, who retired the last three batters, two of them with strikeouts.
For this day, the duel between the reigning champions of Japan and the hosts of Chinese Taipei, both undefeated in two outings, and the Dominican Republic-South Korea, teams that have one win and two losses like the Cubans and Australians, are scheduled for this day.
The next match of the team from the largest Caribbean island will be against the samurai of the Land of the Rising Sun, scheduled for Sunday at 18:00 local time (05:00 in Cuba).
The day before, Venezuela (4-1) and the United States (3-2) got the two tickets to the final round, to be played in Japan from the 20th to the 24th of this month. (Source: ACN)
