Baseball: Tonosaki homers twice as Lions beat Hawks

Shuta Tonosaki hit two of the Seibu Lions’ four home runs in a 7-3 win over the Pacific League-leading SoftBank Hawks on Tuesday.

The Lions turned a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 lead in the fourth inning on back-to-back home runs by Tonosaki and Takeya Nakamura at Tokyo Dome.

In the fifth, Tonosaki’s three-run blast to left made it 5-1 before Mark Payton added a two-run shot for the second-place Lions.

“I’m glad to have hit my first opposite-field long ball in a while,” Tonosaki said on his first home run of the night. “It felt good to round the bases in front of a big crowd.”

Former closer Kaima Ta...