Kiki Milloy homers as USA shutout Chinese Taipei to open World Championship defence

Ally Carda tossed five innings of one hit softball and Kiki Milloy hammered a two-run home run to guide world No. 1 USA to their first win in the XVII WBSC Women’s Softball World Cup Group A against No. 3 Chinese Taipei, 5-0. The experienced right hander struck out two while walking one batter.

In the top of the third, USA second baseman Ali Aguilar knocked in the first run of the game with a single to center field and Milloy followed her, three pitches later, with her home run over the left-center field. USA added single runs in the fifth and sixth innings.

Megan Faraimo, a star of the USA U-18 Women’s National Softball Team 2019 that won the world championship in Irvine, California, struck out five in two innings to complete the shutout.

For Chinese Taipei, the loss was charged to An-Ju Chiu. Catcher Szu-Shih Li delivered the only hit of the game for the Asian team.

After the game, Milloy spoke of how she grew into the game on offence: "I just stayed on the attack. When I first batted, I just missed that pitch but I stuck with the same game plan, and luckily I got a hold of it."

On how the game went: It was the first game so we had a little bit of jitters. We just got out there, we had to make some adjustments with the pitchers, but overall, I think we did a good job. 

On ambitions for the tournament: "Don't let it all get too big. If we just play USA softball, we'll be just fine." 

On preparations for Botswana tomorrow: "We're going to talk about this game, go over what we can improve on.Our pitchers need to look at their hitters, and us hitters need to go over their pitchers, and see what we're going to be up against."

On their time in Ireland: It's been pretty good. We've gone to explore the city a little bit. We went to the Guinness Storehouse and that was fun! It's exciting but we're ready to play now. "