Hardman homers twice as RailRiders beat Indianapolis 6-4

Tyler Hardman hit two homers at Victory Field and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre beat Indianapolis 6-4. Ernesto Martínez Jr. added a solo shot, and the RailRiders held on behind Dom Hamel and Carlos Lagrange.

Hardman set the tone in the second inning with a 373-foot solo drive to left, then came right back in the third and launched a 405-foot blast after Indianapolis had briefly pulled even. That second homer gave Scranton/Wilkes-Barre a 4-1 lead and put pressure on an Indians club that kept trying to claw back. Jhostynxon Garcia answered with the tying run in the second, but Hardman’s power put Scranton/Wilkes-Barre back in front.

Martínez Jr. added a solo homer of his own in the third. Martínez Jr. reached 13 home runs in 64 games, matching his career high from 2024 with Biloxi, while Hardman’s two-homer night was the first of his Triple-A career and the 10th multi-homer game of his professional life.

Scranton/Wilkes-Barre still needed the rest of the roster to finish the job. Hamel worked 5.0 innings and earned the win despite allowing three runs, two earned, and Lagrange locked down the final 1.1 innings for his first Triple-A save, striking out two. Indianapolis kept forcing traffic, drawing nine walks and stranding 13 runners, and Dominic Fletcher scored on a wild pitch in the eighth before the Indians added another run on a passed ball. But the RailRiders answered enough times to keep the lead intact.

The win moved Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to 39-38 and 2-1 in the series, while Indianapolis dropped to 32-46. It also gave the RailRiders a second straight win in Indianapolis as they continued a two-week road trip, with Elmer Rodríguez set to face Noah Davis the next night before the club returned home June 30 to host Norfolk.