Iwata (7-9) gave up two runs on five hits over 5-2/3 innings to take the loss.

NISHINOMIYA, HYOGO PREF. – Tetsuto Yamada snapped a seventh-inning tie with his second RBI double and the Central League-leading Tokyo Yakult Swallows tacked on two more runs in a 5-2 win Monday over the Hanshin Tigers, who fell two games off the pace.

Yamada, who went 3-for-4 with a walk, opened the scoring in the third inning when he plated Shingo Kawabata with a two-out RBI double off Tigers starter Shintaro Fujinami. With the score tied 2-2 in the seventh, one-out singles by Tsuyoshi Ueda and Kawabata off Yuya Ando set the table and Yamada broke the tie with his league-leading 37th double.

“We have a lot of games we can’t afford to lose, so we are under pressure,” Yamada said. “It takes a toll on you physically and mentally, but you just have to go out and do your best. That being said, I don’t feel it at bat: I try not to think too much and just put the best swing I can on the ball.”

Ando (5-4) walked the bases loaded before missing on a 3-2 pitch to Wladimir Balentien that pushed across a run. Yuhei Takai, whose fourth-inning homer gave Yakult a brief lead, delivered a sacrifice fly that capped the three-run rally.

Mauro Gomez hit his 17th home run in the fourth inning off Swallows rookie Toshihiro Sugiura to tie it. It was his third homer in three games.

Giants 4, Dragons 0

At Nagoya Dome, lefty Kazuto Taguchi (3-5) worked 5⅓ solid innings and four relievers completed the shutout as Yomiuri beat Chunichi behind an RBI double from Hisayoshi Chono and a three-run home run from Yasuyuki Kataoka.

Carp 3, BayStars 2

At Mazda Stadium, Hiroshima snapped a three-game losing streak behind Kris Johnson (13-7), who allowed two runs in seven innings. Yoshiyuki Ishihara doubled and scored the go-ahead run in the seventh inning, when Ryosuke Kikuchi drove him in for the second time in a win over Yokohama.

It didn’t take long for the Tigers to start proving him right.

Randy Messenger was solid for seven innings, Mauro Gomez and Matt Murton hit first-inning home runs (Gomez’s a two-run shot), and Hanshin staved off elimination with a 4-2 victory in Game 2 of the Central League Climax Series first stage in front of a crowd of 46,698 on Sunday afternoon at Tokyo Dome.

“It was a good win,” Murton said.

The teams will meet in the decisive Game 3 on Monday. The winner moves on to the final stage against the CL champion Tokyo Yakult Swallows. That series begins Wednesday at Jingu Stadium.

“We have one more life,” Messenger said. “We have to win tomorrow. With the Tigers fans’ support, I know we can win.”

The Tigers were 4-10 down the stretch in the regular season, and backed into the Climax Series after the Chunichi Dragons beat the Hiroshima Carp on Oct. 7. Now, somewhat improbably, they sit one win away from keeping alive their hopes of a second consecutive trip to the Japan Series.

It was a rare win for Hanshin at the Big Egg, where the team had been 2-12 this year, including Saturday’s Game 1 loss.

Messenger got the start for the Tigers and got the job done on the mound. He allowed a pair of runs on nine hits. The big right-hander struck out seven and walked two.

“I feel great,” Messenger said. “The guys stepped up in the first inning. Gomez’s two-run shot and Murton’s home run gave me a three-run lead. Anytime I get a three-run lead early, I’m happy.”

Messenger also praised his partnership with catcher Akihito Fujii.

“Fujii and I had a good thing going today,” he said. “I gave up nine hits, but a lot of them were cheap singles, so it was OK.”

Gomez did a lot of the heavy lifting with his homer in the first. He also had a single and drew a walk. Murton reached base four times, finishing 2-for-3 with a single, homer and two walks.

“I’m just trying to change my approach,” Murton said. “I think a lot of this year, the situations made us real defensive. So I’m just trying to get back to playing baseball the way I expect to play; be a little bit more aggressive, look for something good to hit and go up there and swing it.”

Hanshin’s Taiga Egoshi had a multi-hit game, going 2-for-3, and Takashi Toritani also had a pair of hits and drew a walk.

It was a somber 26th birthday for Giants starter Tomoyuki Sugano, who allowed four runs on six hits over four innings. He struck out five and walked two batters. The Yomiuri fans sang “Happy Birthday” to him during his first at-bat, and the Giants pitcher promptly bunted into an inning-ending double play.

The Giants got their runs on Yasuyuki Kataoka’s RBI groundout in the first and a pinch-hit solo home run by Leslie Anderson in the seventh.

Toritani was moved from third to first in the Hanshin lineup for Game 2 and drew a walk to start the opening frame. Hiroki Uemoto moved the runner up with a sacrifice bunt before Kosuke Fukudome struck out swinging.

The Tigers cashed in with two outs when Gomez sent a 132-kph slider into the seats to give his team a 2-0 advantage. Murton connected on Sugano’s very next pitch, hitting a towering shot into the stands in left field.

“I got a strike and I took a good swing,” Murton said.

Soichiro Tateoka started the home half of the inning with a triple and scored on a groundout by Kataoka.

The Tigers picked up a pair of base runners on one-out singles by Egoshi and Fujii in the fourth. Messenger then bunted a ball toward Sugano. The Yomiuri starter fielded the ball, but made a bad throw to third, in an attempt to get the lead runner. That allowed a run to score.

Anderson brought the Giants within two runs with his home run to lead off the seventh, but the Tigers shut down the Kyojin the rest of the way.

Next up is a good old-fashioned Tokyo showdown against their crosstown rivals, the Yakult Swallows.

“Bring ‘em on,” Giants pitcher Aaron Poreda said.

Shinnosuke Abe picked up a pair of RBIs, Poreda and two relievers held the Tigers in check (despite a late scare) and the Giants beat Hanshin 3-1 in front of a crowd of 46,067 on Monday at Tokyo Dome to win the Central League Climax Series first stage, two games to one.

“Hanshin is a good team and I know this was the last game for (Kentaro) Sekimoto,” Abe said. “They played well and I’m glad we were able to hang on and win.”

The Kyojin move on to the final stage of the Climax Series, where they’ll face the Swallows for the right to represent the CL in the Japan Series. Yakult will have an automatic 1-0 lead (due to winning the pennant) in that series, which begins Wednesday at Jingu Stadium.

“We have one more series to win before we can bring the Japan Series back to Tokyo Dome. I hope we can do that for our fans,” Abe said.

While the Giants move on to Jingu, the Tigers’ season is over.

“You just gotta give those guys credit,” Hanshin’s Matt Murton said. “Obviously we weren’t able to put anything together offensively. They did a great job pitching today. I think our pitchers did a pretty good job.

“We gave ourselves a chance late in the game; that’s all you can ask for. They made the pitches when they had to.”

The result also spells the end of Yutaka Wada’s tenure as Hanshin manager. Wada announced last month he would step down after the Tigers’ season ended. The team is rumored to be trying to lure former star Tomoaki Kanemoto into the dugout. Kanemoto was at Tokyo Dome calling the game for Nippon Television on Monday.

The Giants were facing elimination themselves after losing Game 2. Manager Tatsunori Hara put the season in Poreda’s hands in Game 3. Poreda said, while he didn’t alter his normal approach prior to the game, he understood the magnitude of the moment.

“I was excited,” he said. “Nerves were running high. It was a big game. It was all or nothing. I knew what was at stake and I just tried to stay focused and be aggressive and let my teammates support me.”

Poreda allowed one run on three hits in six-plus innings. He struck out five and didn’t walk a batter.

“One of my goals was not to walk anyone,” Poreda said. “I think that was big for me.”

He was throwing a shutout until Kosuke Fukudome led off the seventh inning with a home run to right.

“Maybe I should’ve thrown a different pitch or to a different location,” Poreda said of the home run ball. “In the end, I wanted to be aggressive and I went right at Fukudome, and you have to tip your cap. He hit a good pitch and he crushed it. Thank goodness it was only one run.”

Scott Mathieson took over from there and retired all six batters he faced in the seventh and eighth frames. Closer Hirokazu Sawamura earned the save by keeping Hanshin off the board in the ninth.

The Tigers made him sweat, putting runners on second and third with one out. Sawamura struck out Mauro Gomez for the second out and then got Murton to ground out to end the game.

“I hit it hard,” Murton said of the game’s final pitch. “It just went right to the shortstop. It easily could’ve found a hole. It’s just the way the game goes. It’s part of baseball.”

Abe was responsible for two of the Giants’ runs, driving in one with a sacrifice fly and another with an RBI single. Hayato Sakamoto scored Yomiuri’s other run by coming home with a head-first dive into the plate on a wild pitch.

“I decided to hit like (former Giants player Noriyoshi) Omichi and shorten my grip on the bat and my swing,” Abe said. “It paid off today.”

Soichiro Tateoka reached base three times, collecting a single, triple and drawing a walk in four trips to the plate.

Hanshin starter Atsushi Nomi wasn’t as sharp as usual but kept the damage to a minimum, allowing just one run on three hits over five innings. Nomi was charged with the loss.

Yomiuri added a pair of insurance runs against reliever Minoru Iwata in the sixth inning.

The Giants can now look forward to the final stage series against the Swallows, who they were 13-12 against during the regular season.

“We were able to win a ticket to Jingu Stadium to face the Swallows, and I look forward to playing and winning there,” Abe said.

Global temperatures from January to August were 0.8 degrees Celsius(1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th-century average and the warmest first 8 months of any year in the books, the National Centers for Environmental Information said in a monthly climate report.

“Are the record temperatures due to climate change or due to El Nino? The answer is yes,” said Deke Arndt, chief of the center’s monitoring branch in Asheville, North Carolina. “Long-term climate change is like climbing a flight of stairs. El Nino is like standing on tippy-toes while you are on one of those stairs.”

The world is so warm that only a major reversal of temperatures will keep 2015 from surpassing last year as the warmest year on record. Before August’s data was tabulated, the world had a 97 percent chance of setting a new high, Ardnt said.

“Adding August to that will raise those odds,” he said Thursday on a conference call with reporters.

Through every month of the year, 2015’s temperature anomalies have outpaced each of the previous five warmest years on record. That includes 1998, when the world experienced a powerful El Nino.

“Eight months through a 12-lap race, and you can see the lead it has on its competitors,” Ardnt said.

Last month also was the warmest August on record, with temperatures rising to 1.58 degrees above the 20th century average. It was the sixth month this year that broke its own record.

In the U.S., there is a growing chance above-normal temperatures will persist in Alaska and along the West Coast, as well as in the upper Midwest and Northeast, through February. That is in line with what can happen during a strong El Nino, said Dan Collins, a research scientist at the U.S. Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

Warmer temperatures in the mountains of California can affect snowpack there. The snow is needed to provide the state, now in its fourth year of drought, with water throughout the year.

“It is not a clear picture as to whether or not there will be snowpack,” Collins said.

As part of Thursday’s report, the U.S. predicted drought will persist across most of California into December. There is a chance conditions will improve in the southern part of the state even if the drought doesn’t end there.

In the Arctic, the sea ice dropped to 22.3 percent below the 1981-2010 average, according to the report. That was the fourth-smallest for August since records began in 1979.

The Antarctic, which had been seeing large sea-ice growth in its winter months in past years, also had a below-average total.

The lack of sea ice in the Arctic will probably keep temperatures warmer than normal across Alaska and lead to more precipitation there in months to come, the report said.