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Sizemore, Indians thump Padres

Jun 14, 2008 - 6:31 AM By Todd Krepop PA SportsTicker Contributing Writer

CLEVELAND (Ticker) -- Not even a rain delay of nearly three hours could cool off the red-hot Grady Sizemore

Sizemore hit two home runs and the Cleveland Indians defeated the San Diego Padres, 9-5, on Friday in the opener of a three-game interleague series.

Kelly Shoppach also homered for the Indians, who won for the first time in interleague play this year in a game that didn't end until well past 1 a.m. Saturday. But that wasn't enough to slow down Sizemore.

In his last 14 games, Sizemore has connected for eight home runs to catapult himself to a tie for second in the American League with 16 home runs.

"I'm not trying to hit home runs," Sizemore said. "But I have to admit that I am feeling pretty comfortable at the plate."

Sizemore led off the first with his fifth leadoff home run of the season. Sizemore blasted Josh Banks' 1-1 offering over the right field wall to give Cleveland an early lead. But two batters later, rain and thunderstorms moved in and forced the game to be delayed for two hours, 43 minutes.

With this being the only meeting of the season, both teams were forced to wait out the storms.

"If you have an opportunity to play, you are going to do whatever you can to play," Indians manager Eric Wedge said. "You could see there would be clearing and we couldn't wait much longer."

Five hours after he hit his first home run, Sizemore connected off reliever Mike Adams in the seventh for a two-run homer. Sizemore sent Adams' 2-0 pitch 430 feet into the right field stands for his fourth career two-homer game - third this season - to extend Cleveland's lead 7-4.

"(Home runs) seem to come in bunches," said Sizemore, who is batting .357 during his hitting streak.

"He is a fantastic player," Wedge said. "He had a couple of big home runs for us."

Cleveland tacked on two more runs in the eighth on Jamey Carroll's RBI single and a sacrifice fly by Ben Francisco.

Rafael Betancourt (2-3) pitched 1 2/3 scoreless innings to pick up the win and Masa Kobayashi worked 1 1/3 scoreless innings to pick up his third save.

Trailing, 4-3, Cleveland managed to put a rally together off of reliever Cla Meredith. Francisco and Ryan Garko hit consecutive one-out singles and Jhonny Peralta walked with two outs to load the bases.

Shin-Soo Choo swung at the first pitch he saw from Meredith (0-2) and rolled a grounder through the hole at second to score two runs.

"I think the one pitch he would want back is the one to Peralta," Padres manager Bud Black said. "He had him down 1-2 and walked him. He got the ground ball to Choo but it found a hole."

Adrian Gonzalez's two-run homer off of Jeremy Sowers in the fifth gave the Padres a 4-3 lead. Gonzalez now has 62 RBI, which lead the National League.