Photo Caption: The two Brno baseball teams will meet up in south Brno this Friday. First pitch is 7 p.m. Photo Credit: Lenka Brožová.
Brno, June 16 (BD) — This week in Brno sport, all eyes were on baseball and tennis, as Brno’s two baseball teams faced off in a three-game series, while local rising star Barbora Krejčíková took both the singles and doubles titles at the tennis French Open.
BASEBALL
Draci Start Top Six, Push to Defend Title
Similar to how the first phase of the extraliga baseball season ended, the Top Six phase will begin: the Brno Draci and Hroši Brno will play a three-game series.
The defending-champion Draci swept the three-game series earlier this month.
Part 2 will begin Friday in South Brno at 7 p.m. Then the series will move to Jundrov for Saturday and Sunday games that start at 1 p.m.
The Top Six phase of the season stretches through June and July. It will determine the seeds for the postseason from the six best teams of the first phase. Arrows Ostrava (21-6) finished atop the standings in the first phase, scoring 275 runs in 27 games, much better than the next-best offenses of Třebíč Nuclears (162), Hroši Brno (161 runs) and the Draci (157).
Draci Brno (18-9) was second in the first-phase standings, followed by Eagles Praha (17-10), Sokol Hluboká (17-10), Cardion Hroši Brno (14-13) and Tempo Praha (13-14).
Michal Ondráček of Hroši Brno is leading the league with an impressive .478 batting average. The next four players on the list are from Ostrava’s powerful offense.
The Draci, as normal, have top pitchers. Radim Chroust (5-2) has a 1.02 ERA, 41 strikeouts and 15 walks. David Mergans (5-1) has a 1.71 ERA with a similar strikeout-walk ratio: 40-15.
The Draci are scheduled to play Ostrava on July 8, 9 and 10 in a rematch of the last year’s championship series and a potential preview for this year’s championship series.
For updated information and the schedule for Czech extraliga baseball, go to the league website at https://extraliga.baseball.cz/. Use Google Chrome, right-click anywhere on the page and select “Translate to English”.
TENNIS
Moravian Krejčíková Takes Two Titles
Casual sports fans around the world learned the name “Barbora Krejčíková” last weekend when the 25-year-old won the French Open women’s singles tennis tournament as an unseeded player.
They were likely even more intrigued when, the next day, Krejčíková added the women’s doubles championship with her partner Kateřina Siniaková.
However, those in the sports circles of Brno and Moravia have known the name “Krejčíková” for a long time.
Krejčíková is from Ivančice, a small town about 20 km southwest of Brno. It is known for a garlic festival in the spring and it is the birthplace of the artist Alphonse Mucha, another Czech who made it big in Paris. Krejčíková described herself as “a girl from a small town who started playing tennis against a wall” in an interview in Sport.cz.
Prior to her recent French Open success, Krejčíková had established herself as a doubles player on the international professional circuit, having won the women’s doubles titles at the 2018 French Open and 2018 Wimbledon and the mixed doubles titles at the Australian Open in 2019, 2020, and 2021.
The Wimbledon Championships will begin on June 28 and conclude on Sunday, July 11.
