There is always baseball happening — almost too much baseball for one person to follow themselves.
Don’t worry, we’re here to help you by figuring out what you missed but shouldn’t have. Here are all the best moments from the weekend in Major League Baseball:
Mariners win, gain on Astros
Sure, there have been genuine concerns about how good the Mariners actually are throughout the season, but there are a couple of things to consider about them right now. They didn’t have Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suárez for most of the year, only picking them up at the trade deadline, and the two of them are thriving for Seattle: Naylor is batting .271/.315/.486 with 8 home runs in 39 games with the Mariners, while Suárez, after a rough first 15 games in his reunion with the M’s, has hit .242/.324/.560 with 8 homers of his own in his last 25 contests.
Which is to say that the past sins of this year’s Mariners might still haunt them, but they are a stronger team now than they were. And after a win on Tuesday — their fourth in a row, this one powered by Naylor’s third homer in his last four games as well as Randy Arozarena‘s first dinger of the month — against the Cardinals, they find themselves just one game back of the AL West-leading Astros, since Houston blew it against the Blue Jays.
This isn’t just a matter of Seattle and Houston duking it out for the division with the other ending up with a wild card, either. Both of these teams are in danger of not actually making the postseason at all, and the division gives them the most distance between that nightmare and the reality they would prefer to live in. That’s because the Rangers sit just 1.5 back of the third wild card spot, and 2.5 behind the Astros for the division lead: there is a scenario where the Mariners take the West, Houston falls even further and Texas scoops up that wild card, leaving the Astros out in the cold come October.
Now, it’s not the most-likely scenario, but basically anything goes with this little time left on the schedule. Baseball Reference’s playoff odds have the Mariners with the best chance to win the AL West, despite being down at present, at 43.6%. The Astros are at 37.7% and the Rangers at 18.7% — the overall playoff odds for the three are, in order, 75.8%, 63.2% and 48.6%. Which means the Rangers are basically a coin flip at this point, owing to gaining 19.1% to their odds with a strong last month coupled with the Astros and Mariners playing mediocre ball. Except there are three teams to consider on this flip, not two: someone is going to end up heartbroken, and it could be any of the three, regardless of where they stand as of Wednesday morning.
Speaking of the Astros
The Blue Jays walked off the Astros on Tuesday, allowing them to gain a game in the AL East standings over the Yankees — New York allowed the Tigers to score nine runs in the seventh, breaking what had been a 2-2 tie to that point — and they did so in nail-biting fashion.
The Astros went up 2-0 in the first on a Carlos Correa home run, then Yainer Diaz added another run on a double in the sixth. The Jays would finally respond in the bottom half of the inning when George Springer launched his 28th homer of the year to cut the lead to 3-1, but the real drama kicked off in the bottom of the ninth, when Bryan Abreu came in to close it out for Houston.
Alejandro Kirk opened the frame with a walk, then Ernie Clement singled over pinch-runner Tyler Heineman. Davis Schneider would draw a free pass, loading the bases for Isiah Kiner-Falefa, who had entered the game as a pinch-hitter in the seventh but didn’t get the job done then.
Here, he’d single in two runs, tying the game and forcing it to extras. Where Vladimir Guerrero Jr. made an incredibly heads up play by getting lead runner Jose Altuve out at third, eliminating the extra-innings advantage of starting the 10th with a baserunner.
The Astros would go down in order, giving the Blue Jays a chance to walk it off in the bottom of the 10th. And they did:
Guerrero singled Myles Straw over to third base to begin the inning, and then Heineman drove in Straw on a fielder’s choice. The Jays won, gaining ground in the East while also keeping half-a-game up on the Tigers for the AL’s top seed, and Houston… well, they’re 3-7 in their last 10, and you just read about why that’s a real problem for them right now.
Early’s stunning debut
The Red Sox, unlike the Yankees, also picked up a win on Tuesday, allowing them to keep pace with the Blue Jays and tie New York for the top wild card spot in the AL. They did this in part thanks to a hell of a big-league debut Connelly Early, who tied a Red Sox franchise record with 11 strikeouts in his first start, matching Don Aase in 1977.
With Dustin May on the IL, the Sox needed to plug in a starter, and Early was next in line. Despite being a day two pick in the draft, improvements to his fastball in the minors have made him into a more significant prospect who could even pitch his way into a spot on the postseason roster. This first outing — 11 strikeouts and 1 walk across five scoreless innings — won’t hurt his chances, either.
Adames nears 30
Rafael Devers has 31 homers this season, but the first 15 of those came with the Red Sox. Which means that the Giants still haven’t had a 30-homer player since 2004, when Barry Bonds hit 45 of them. That’s over two decades now! Except shortstop Willy Adames is doing his best to fix that problem, and he’s real close to it, too, despite a poor start to the year. On Tuesday, he hit his 28th dinger of the year — just two more, and this weird little drought is over for San Francisco.
Part of the issue is their home park, which is one of the unfriendliest for homers in the majors, but it’s also about a lack of players with the kind of power who can hit one out anywhere, all the time. Devers has that kind of pop — he does have 16 homers for the Giants in 73 games, suggesting 30 in a full 2026 in San Francisco wouldn’t be much of a lift — and Adames has had that kind of pop since his mid-20s, too. The Giants acquired both of them within the last year — Adames as a free agent over the offseason, and Devers midseason. That’s one way to force a resolution.
He can’t keep doing this
Are you sitting down? Good, because there is shocking news to share. Padres’ star Fernando Tatis Jr. robbed another home run. That’s typical for him at this point, sure, but check this play out. This is a phenomenal theft.
With his back turned! The Padres wouldn’t end up winning thanks to a Reds’ rally in the ninth, which dropped them to two games behind the victorious Dodgers in the NL West. But hey. Nice catch.
Schwarber reaches 50
Kyle Schwarber hit his 50th homer of the season, and for the first time in his career — he’s just the 34th player in MLB history to reach that threshold, and one of two Phillies to ever hit 50 in a season along with Ryan Howard, who did so in 2006 with a franchise-record 58 blasts.
Schwarber joins Cal Raleigh as the second player with 50 this year, as well, putting 2025 in elite company. There are now 14 seasons with at least two 50-homer players in them: 1938, 1947, 1961, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2006, 2007, 2017, 2024 and now 2025. Should Shohei Ohtani reach 50 — he’s at 48 with 17 games to go — then 2025 would be just the third season with at least three players to reach that mark, along with 1998 and 2001, which both had four 50-homer players in them.
With Aaron Judge and Suárez also mashing, four could happen in 2025, as well, if not five for the first time ever. Judge, by the way, hit his 44th long ball of the year and 359th of his career on Tuesday, giving him sole possession of fifth place all-time in Yankees’ homer history, breaking a tie with Hall of Famer Yogi Berra. Next up? Joe DiMaggio at 361.
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