Will to fight …
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Some rights reserved.
The “Handkerchief Price” didn’t get a win for his efforts, but the Nippon Ham Fighters were big winners in the end.
Yuki Saito fired 5.2 hit-filled innings, holding the first-place SoftBank Hawks to two runs, and the Fighters scrambled up enough offense for a 5-2 comeback win at Sapporo Dome on Sunday.
The rookie righty surrendered nine hits and a walk with three Ks but kept the Hawks in range of a pair of scoring flyballs.
Nippon Ham tied the score on a sac fly in the sixth before Micah Hauffpauir muscled a single into right center that plated the go-ahead run. The victory helped the Fighters take two of three in the weekend series and move to within 2.5 of the Hawks.
“It’s important for us to win a showdown like this so I’m just glad the team was able to come out of it today with a victory,” said Saito, who worked out of a no-out, bases-loaded jam without allowing a run in the third
inning.
Yuya Ishii (2-0) got one out in the sixth for the victory and Hisashi Takeda notched his Japan-best 29th save with a scoreless ninth.
Sho Nakata, who had two RBIs, singled home a run in the seventh and seventh-year pro Atsushi Ugumori cracked his second career homer in the eighth to pad the lead.
BUFFALOES 4, LIONS 2
Lee Seung Yeop smacked a two-run walk-off homer in the 10th inning as Orix downed sliding Seibu at Kyocera Dome Osaka.
It was Lee’s third career walk-off homer, his first with the third-place Buffaloes, who are two games under .500. The Lions are 4-6 in August.
MARINES 4, EAGLES 3
Shota Ishimine had three hits and Kazuya Fukuura’s sixth-inning sac fly was the difference as third-place Lotte downed Rakuten at The Kleenex Box.
CENTRAL LEAGUE
TIGERS 8, SWALLOWS 7
Craig Brazell had two doubles and three RBIs and Keiichi Hirano had four hits and an RBI before Kyuji Fujikawa put out a six-alarm fire in the ninth as Hanshin took the rubber game against Yakult at Jingu Stadium.
The Swallows rallied with six runs in the ninth before Fujikawa ended the game with a strikeout as the Tigers shaved the Swallows’ CL lead to four games.
GIANTS 6, CARP 2
Kentaro Nishimura (5-0) stayed perfect in five decisions as a starter with five innings of two-run pitching, and Shinnosuke Abe slugged a go-ahead three-run homer [his 13th] in the fifth to lift Yomiuri past visiting Hiroshima and back to the .500 mark.
Alex Ramirez played in his 1,500th game, becoming the 170th player to reach that mark. The 11th year outfielder went 1-for-3.
BAYSTARS 1, DRAGONS 0
Daisuke Miura (2-2) carried a no-no into the seventh inning and finished with 7.2 scoreless innings, and Yuta Naito knocked in the game’s only run with a fifth-inning single as Yokohama blanked visiting Chunichi.