KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Jake Westbrook opened the game with a four-pitch walk, and worked around traffic for most of his six innings. He still didn’t have full confi­dence in his sinker, dropping his arm angle to offset his insecurity.

What Westbrook did get was a win, his first since reconstructive right elbow sur­gery. No matter how he got there, that sure feels good.

Russell Branyan homered twice in support of Westbrook’s first win in two years, lifting the Cleveland Indians to an 8-2 victory over the backpedaling Kansas City Royals on Tuesday night.

“It’s nice to get that first win and pitch well doing it,” said Westbrook, who had Tommy John surgery in June 2008. “It wasn’t real pretty, but I put up some zeros and only gave up that one run. I had baserunners all night, but made pitches when I had to.”

Westbrook (1-2) used his sinker and an occasional drop-down delivery to induce 13 groundouts and held the Royals to five hits for his first win since April 8, 2008, against the Angels.

More photos below.

Branyan provided the power, hitting a tworun homer off Brian Bannister (1-3) in the second and a solo shot off Joakim Soria in the ninth for his first multihomer game in exactly three years. Jhonny Peralta added a two-run double, Austin Kearns scored three runs and had an RBI, and the Indians collected 10 hits to win consecutive games for the first time in a month.

“He (Westbrook) gave us a chance to get our lineup going,” Indians manager Manny Acta said.

This matchup featured the bottom of the AL Central.

The last-place Royals were coming off a 3-8 season-long trip that ended with a four-game sweep at Texas. The lowlights included too many walks, shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt’s fine-inducing botched popup and an inexplicable failure by the entire team to notice a runner advancing to second without tagging up.

The Royals followed the dismal trip with another clunker, getting an average outing from Bannister, an almost-predictable bullpen blowup and base-to-base hitting to see their losing streak reach six games.

“I think everybody is putting a lot of pressure on themselves in every aspect of the game,” Bannister said after his 100th career appearance. “We’re playing tense out there.”

The Indians have only been marginally better. Plagued by swing-and-miss hitting, Cleveland tumbled down the standings with three wins in 12 games. Cleveland struck out 86 times in an eight-game homestand and entered Tuesday as the third-worst team in baseball at scoring and hitting homers.

The Indians ended a five-game skid Sunday against Detroit by getting five RBIs from their No. 7-8 hitters, and got production from the middle of the lineup to beat the Royals in the opener of an eight-game road trip.