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Sunday’s games

Tigers 4, Carp 1: At Koshien Stadium, Hiroto Saiki (2-3) returned to the Tigers rotation for the first time since April, and pitched as well as he does when he’s right, striking out seven and walking none while allowing an unearned run in 6-2/3 innings.

Teruaki Sato scored two of the Tigers’ runs, and Ryutaro Umeno walked, singled twice and drove in three. Hiroshima’s Drew Anderson (2-1) allowed two runs, one earned, over 4-1/3 innings.

Tigers-Carp highlights

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Yomiuri’s Foster Griffin had his obligatory good outing against Chunichi, two second-chancers had big games for their clubs, while another guy who badly needed a second chance but finally got playing time with the team that drafted him in 2013 also delivered. The red-and-black attack keeps rolling, a former closer threw a complete game, and a rookie named Morishita got the better of a former rookie of the year named Morishita.

Minor moves

On Friday, the SoftBank Hawks called up a minor league pitcher, which is not really news worthy, other than that the team ordered him pulled off the mound in his Western League game so he could report to the major league club.

Meanwhile, DeNA announced it was letting the team’s recent graduate of MLB’s domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse suspension program to pitch in the Eastern League Sunday against Lotte as a tune-up for his next start. He was not deactivated.

Saturday’s games

Giants 6, Dragons 2: At Tokyo Dome, Foster Griffin (4-1) held Chunichi to two runs over six innings to improve to 3-0 against the Dragons, who coughed up the game’s first run on one-out singles by Takumi Oshiro and Yuto Akihiro and an error by shortstop Ryuku Tsuchida.

Naoki Yoshikawa doubled off Shinnosuke Ogasawara (3-2) and scored on a Kazumasa Okamoto third-inning single, while Yoshikawa and Okamoto reached in the fourth and Takumi Oshiro followed with his sixth homer, and his first career grand slam.

Second-chancer Seiya Hosokawa had two doubles for the Dragons and scored on Takaya Ishikawa’s fourth home run, while the Giants bullpen didn’t make the game interesting for a change.