Embarrassment of riches …

Fighters score in double digits as Takeda cruises

Masaru Takeda couldn’t get any run support over five starts earlier this year, so the 10 runs the Nippon Ham Fighters scored on Friday against the Seibu Lions must have seemed like an embarrassment of riches.
Takeda (8-5), second in the Pacific League with his 1.20 ERA, twirled a six-hitter, with seven Ks and no walks over the distance in a 10-2 win over the Lions at Sapporo Dome. It was his sixth career complete game and he won his sixth straight decision.
Newcomer Bobby Scales went 3-for-4 with a grand slam to lead a 15-hit assault on Seibu, touching up last year’s Sawamura Award winner Hideaki Wakui (5-7) for eight runs, five earned, on 10 hits and two walks in 3.2 innings. Scales cracked his second longball -- since being acquired on July 2 -- into the front row in the seats in right to cap an eight-run fourth inning to blow the game open.
Scales (who had to offer moral support to the team’s tongue-tied interpreter on the hero-interview podium) singled and homered in the fourth, when the Fighters batted around in an inning that seemed to take forever.
“I felt it was a long time between innings, so I went to the bullpen and played catch just to keep warm and stay ready, and that helped me,” said Takeda, whose error in the sixth eventually led to Seibu’s only runs.
“We scored a bunch of runs so I was able to just go out there relax and throw. My own mistake led to the runs that scored, but I was able to regroup and just pitch."
Yang Zhong-sho went 4-for-4 with two RBIs and Yoshio Itoi had two hits for the Fighters, who went 20 games over .500 but remained a game behind SoftBank, which won at The Q.
It's Nippon Ham’s first six-game winning streak against Seibu in 18 years.

HAWKS 6, MARINES 4
Shota Oba (1-0) worked 3.1 scoreless innings of relief, and Hitoshi Tamura’s fifth-inning RBI single put SoftBank in the lead in a comeback win over Lotte at The Q.
Yuichi Honda had his first four-hit game in two years and knocked in two to help Oba, who took over for Hiroki Yamada and earned his first win in two years.

EAGLES 4, BUFFALOES 0
Takashi Kawai (1-3) scattered five hits and two walks over six innings, and Luis Garcia had two hits, including an RBI single in a four-run third, as Rakuten blanked Orix at The Kleenex Box.
Eagles pitchers set a club record by reaching 33 consecutive scoreless innings. It was Kawai’s first win since Sept. 22.

CENTRAL LEAGUE

SWALLOWS 2, GIANTS 1
Kyohei Muranaka (1-0) worked six innings of one-run ball for his first win since Oct. 2 as Yakult downed Yomiuri at The Big Egg to beat their Tokyo rivals for the eighth straight time, the first time the club has done that in 54 years.
Muranaka, who returned from an oblique injury that got him deactivated on May 2, scattered four hits and a walk with three Ks to help the Swallows go 15 games over .500 for the first time in nine seasons.
Yomiuri’s Alex Ramirez, who missed his first start in the cleanup spot for the club since May 3, 2008 the previous night, saw his consecutive games played streak end at 985. Ramirez appeared on Thursday as a pinch-hitter, but didn’t get the chance to come to the plate in the ninth inning, when Lim Chang Yang shut down the Giants in order for his 19th save.

CARP 6, DRAGONS 0
Bryan Bullington (9-4) shut down Chunichi again and 30-year-old Takamitsu Io, a career minor leaguer for most of his 12-plus seasons, hit his first pro homer and doubled in a pair in a four-run sixth to lead Hiroshima at Nagoya Dome.
Bullington, who on April 29 carried a no-hitter into the eighth in a 7-0 shutout at Nagoya Dome, has won all three starts against the Dragons, who have lost four straight. Io, who had his first three-hit game, blasting a solo shot to left in the fifth to break a scoreless tie as the Carp moved into fourth place.

BAYSTARS 4, TIGERS 0
Naoyuki Shimizu (1-2) had a flashback night, scattering five hits and a walk over seven shutout innings, and Brett Harper’s clutch single in the fourth was all the support the righty needed for his first win since Sept. 14 as Yokohama blanked visiting Hanshin.
Shuichi Murata blasted his 11th longball -- first since June 29 -- and two others each knocked in runs for the last-place BayStars.