Big Al joins select company

Ramirez hits 300th longball as Giants win

Alex Ramirez said his plan was to come to Japan and play for a season. That was in 2001 when he became a Yakult Swallow.
He has swallowed up a lot of pitches since then, and Saturday he became just the third foreign player to reach the 300-homer plateau, belting a solo shot in the ffith inning of Yomiuiri’s 4-2 win over the Lotte Marines in interleague play at Tokyo Dome.
Ramirez calls himself a line-drive hitter who has been helped by the ballparks where the ball carries.
But only Tuffy Rhodes, who hit 464 longballs, and Orix slugger Alex Cabrera, who has 330, have at least 300 round-trippers.
Hayato Sakamoto and Michihiro Ogasawara also hit solo blasts, and Shun Tono (7-1) worked 8.1 innings before leaving Marc Kroon a mess to clean up for his Central League-leading seventh win. Kroon earned his sixth save after allowing a walk and a hit.

DRAGONS 5, BUFFALOES 4
Tony Blanco homered, and doubled in the tying run in the ninth -- his fourth RBI -- and Masaaki Koike ripped a walk-off single up the middle as host Chunichi rallied to beat Orix at Nagoya Dome.
It was Koike’s second career walk-off hit, and came on his 30th birthday.

TIGERS 3, EAGLES 2
Craig Brazell’s 13th homer, a solo shot, was the difference as Hanshin sacked Rakuten at Koshien Stadium.

CARP 1, FIGHTERS 0
Masato Akamatsu’s ninth-inning sayonara single to beat Nippon Ham was the first of his six-plus-year career and gave Hiroshima its fifth walk-off win this season.

LIONS 12, BAYSTARS 3
Last year’s Sawamura Award winner Hideaki Wakui (5-2) had two singles and a bases-clearing double for four RBIs, and also limited Yokohama to three runs over seven innings as Seibu cruised and moved back into first place in the Pacific League.

HAWKS 2, SWALLOWS 0
Munenori Kawasaki’s two-run second-inning single were all the runs Tsuyoshi Wada (5-3) needed as SoftBank topped Yakult at Jingu Stadium.