Come back swinging ...

Takahashi hits 2 HRs as Giants avoid sweep

The Hanshin Tigers had made the Central League’s top dogs look like lost dogs in the first two games of their three-game set at Tokyo Dome. But the Giants took a few bites out of Casey Fossum and avoided a sweep with a 10-2 thrashing of Hanshin on Sunday.
Yoshinobu Takahashi belted a pair of homers and drove in five, and pesky Tetsuya Matsumoto had four hits, his first base knocks since being sidelined with a thigh injury on April 25, and the Giants responded to skipper Tatsunori Hara’s call to match Hanshin’s intensity.
The victory stopped a five-game skid to the Kansai Cats, who fell to three games back in the standings.
Takahashi took Fossum (2-5) deep with one on in the second, and cracked his ninth of the season in his next at-bat with a pair on for a 7-0 Giants lead.
Lost in the shuffle, mostly be he pouted off the field with the bases loaded in the sixth inning, was CL win leader Shun Tono (11-2). The right-hander allowed just two runs, none earned, on seven hits and a walk, while punching out two.
Tono got the hook when he, and an error behind him, worked himself into a jam that Tetsuya Yamaguchi extracted him from to limit the damage.
Thanks to a season-high 16 hits to support him, Tono took over the league lead in wins.
In the meantime, hot-hitting Shinnosuke Abe -- who hit .375 with 14 homers in June -- smacked his 28th longball to tie for the CL lead.

DRAGONS 8, SWALLOWS 5
Dionys Cesar had three hits and two RBIs and Kazuhiro Wada added two hits and a pair of RBIs as Chunichi downed Yakult in Akita.
Yakult’s Norichika Aoki doubled in the sixth inning to become the 258th player to reach the 1,000-hit plateau. He reached the figure in 770 games, second fastest behind Ichiro Suzuki.

CARP 4, BAYSTARS 2
Jun Hirose broke a 2-2 deadlock with an RBI single in the sixth inning, and Takahiro Iwamoto hit his first pro homer and drove in two as Hiroshima topped Yokohama at the Zoom.
Takuro Ishii had two hits to move past Chunichi skipper Hiromitsu Ochiai and into the 10th on the all-time hits list with his 2,373rd.

PACIFIC LEAGUE

FIGHTERS 11, EAGLES 5
Kensuke Tanaka homered in a six-run ninth inning and had four RBIs to help lift Nippon Ham past Rakuten at the Kleenex Box.
Shinya Tsuruoka led three others with three hits in a 19-hit attack.

MARINES 9, LIONS 7
Saburo Omura keyed a five-run eighth-inning rally with an RBI single, and Tadahito Iguchi had two hits and two RBIs to lead Lotte past front-running Seibu.

BUFFALOES 9, HAWKS 1
Alex Cabrera had three hits and three RBI to lead Orix past SoftBank at Kyocera Dome Osaka.