Last Night in Baseball: Good Morning to the First-Place Seattle Mariners

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 via walk-off again

The Mariners have won six games in a row, and the last two were on walk-off hits. Even better is how unlikely said walk-off hits were: on Wednesday, Leo Rivas hit a 2-run homer in the 13th inning to give Seattle the win, two innings after he was brought in as a pinch-runner and thrown out at home. He wasn’t even supposed to be there, and he ended up the hero for completely different reasons.

Thursday was no less wild, as this time around the game went 12 innings, and rookie Harry Ford, who had three plate appearances and no hits or RBIs or anything to that point, hit a sac fly for the win. Ford was a pinch-hitter for Jose Castillo, a pitcher who had been brought in for the top of the inning, because the Mariners had shuffled things around earlier and lost the DH when Jorge Polanco moved from there to second base because the flurry of win-it-now moves made in the prior inning had emptied out the bench.

Even before that occurred, though, this was a back-and-forth affair. The game went to extras tied 4-4, and neither team scored in the 10th. In the 11th, the visiting Angels got on the board, and the Mariners matched them in the bottom of the frame thanks to J.P Crawford singling in Luke Raley from second.

The Angels, undeterred, scored again in the top of the 12th thanks to a Matthew Lugo single, but Seattle answered back again in the bottom of the inning, when Jorge Polanco — again, now the second baseman — hit an RBI double to even things up 5-5. 

And then came Ford pinch-hitting for Castillo. A sac fly isn’t beautiful, but it counts the same on the scoreboard, especially when all you need is the one run.

Let’s not let the straight-up weirdness of the game be overshadowed, either: this one matchup featured umpire interference, a batter hitting the catcher with the follow-through on their swing and a catcher’s interference. Chaos!

With the Astros losing, the Mariners are now tied for the AL West lead at 79-68. The Rangers are just two games back of both clubs for both the final wild card spot and the division. We have ourselves an actual race with consequences beyond seeding going on in the AL, folks, and and just over two weeks left to see it through.

Phillies sweep the Mets

The Mets nearly avoided a sweep, going up 4-0 on the Phillies in the first inning and then holding them scoreless for five innings. Philadelphia eventually answered back, though, and with authority, scoring six unanswered runs in the fourth, fifth and sixth innings. That score would hold, too: the Mets might have gotten to starter Jesus Luzardo early, but he pitched seven scoreless frames after that, and closer Jhoan Duran shut the door in the ninth.

Otto Kemp was the other star of the day for Philadelphia, with a pair of hits and 3 of the team’s RBIs, as well as a pair of runs scored. His 2-run homer off of David Peterson in the fourth inning is what first put the Phillies on the board, and a double in the sixth tied up the game 4-4. Former Met and 2025 trade deadline acquisition Harrison Bader put the Phillies up for good with a single that scored Kemp that same inning.

You’re going to see a whole lot of “What’s wrong with the Mets?” out there after they were swept by the Phillies, but sometimes, the other team is just better. The Phillies have been better than the Mets for most of 2025. They were better than them, and definitively so as far as the regular season goes, in this four-game series. The Mets have Juan Soto, they have Pete Alonso, they have Francisco Lindor, but their pitching isn’t where Philadelphia’s is yet, and that’s probably the major difference between the two.

That all being said, it’s not as if the Mets can’t compete with the Phillies: New York swept them at home not all that long ago, and if the two face off in October, not all of the games will be played in Philly. The Mets just have to get to meaningful October baseball first, is all: New York is just 1.5 up for the final wild card spot in the NL, 

Judge bashes his way to history

“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” To fifth place, next time Aaron Judge goes deep. Judge just passed Yogi Berra for fifth on the all-time homers list for the Yankees, but DiMaggio was right there in front of him, two homers away, and he got both of them on Thursday night.

His 45th of the season came early, as Judge hit a solo shot in the first off of Tigers’ starter Tyler Holton.

And it didn’t take overly long for the second, tying dinger of the evening, with Judge sending his 46th of the year and 361st of his career into orbit in the third to put New York up 4-1.

One more, and Judge is securely in fourth on his own, with DiMaggio in fifth. It’s going to take some time for Judge to move up further than this, despite the recent rapid ascension. Lou Gehrig is next up, at 493 homers. Even for Judge that’s more than a couple of seasons away from happening.

Speaking of home run history

Mike Trout finally hit home run number 399 of his career, after a 28-game stretch without one. Or much of anything, really, as Trout had just a .635 OPS over those games. 

Trout, not only briefly tied the game for the Angels before whatever magic the Mariners have going on came storming back, but is now one dinger shy of being just the 60th player in MLB history to reach 400 homers. Fun little story, to show you how difficult it is to make it up this list of the all-time home run leaders: over 1,000 players in MLB history have hit at least 100 home runs, but just 389 have made it to 200 and of those 164 reached 300. Trout will make 60 for 400, but whether he makes it to 500 is anyone’s guess: it might seem like there are tons of 500-homer hitters because we had a run of them for a few years there, but there are just 28 ever — there are more hitters with 3,000-career hits than with 500 homers!

What a slide!

The Rockies might have lost to the Padres 2-0 in their series opener, but don’t let that result take away from this magical slide by Mickey Moniak.

Slow-motion replay is part of the magic here, of course, but Moniak’s body did that. In real-time! Baseball players are something else.

The Guardians aren’t dead yet

Cleveland might not win a wild card spot, but they aren’t giving up on that dream just yet. They sit 3.5 back of the Mariners and Astros after a victory on Thursday night, brought to them by an eighth-inning, 2-run home run by C.J. Kayfus

Great news for the Guardians, and terrible for the Royals, who very well might have their the last of their hopes for their own playoff spot dashed with that swing. Kansas City is now five back of the Astros and Mariners, and it seems unlikely that they would leapfrog the Guardians, Rangers, and then whichever of the AL West leaders falters with all of 15 games left on their schedule. Not impossible! But unlikely: their already-low playoff odds, per Baseball Reference, now sit at under 1%, a 12 percentage-point drop in the last week.

The Guardians are barely hanging on, at 8% if you round up, but it’s going to be a lot easier for them to increase their postseason odds at this point than for the Royals — hell, they are only at 8% as is because that figure quadrupled in the last week: the Guardians have won six of their last seven.

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