Last Night In Baseball: Mariners Homer Their Way To W Against Dodgers

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 last night in Major League Baseball:

Things started out well enough for the Dodgers against the Mariners. Shohei Ohtani led off the bottom of the first with homer No. 23 of the year, which was also his 10th leadoff homer of the season.

Ohtani would later single in another run to make it a 4-4 game — this one was a back-and-forth affair out of the gate — and then third baseman Max Muncy would tie Eric Karros for the most homers hit in Dodger Stadium with a blast that gave Los Angeles a 5-4 lead.

But this is where the Dodgers began to run out of fight. In the top of the sixth, right fielder Dominic Canzone tied the game up, 5-5, with his 17th dinger of the year: a 433-foot blast off lefty Justin Wrobleski, the fourth homer the 2026 All-Star would allow in the game.

Canzone would then come back to the plate in the eighth, against reliever Alex Vesia, with center fielder Julio Rodríguez already on base. Canzone would go deep a second time, making it 7-5 Mariners — Seattle would end up winning, 7-6.

Canzone went 2-for-4 on the day, with three RBIs and two runs, continuing what has been an excellent year-plus run for him. Canzone missed almost all of April and did miss all of May in 2025, but returned in June to be an every day player: in the 173 games and 506 at-bats since, Canzone is batting .283/.347/.510 with 29 homers and 26 doubles, despite the pitcher-friendly leanings of T-Mobile Park, which has been the worst park for left-handed batters like Canzone over the last three years, per StatCast’s park factors.

His success has helped the team weather poor performances by last year’s other productive batters, like Josh Naylor and Cal Raleigh, and the Mariners find themselves 1.5 back of a wild-card spot despite a tough start to the year. Meanwhile, the Dodgers will be just fine, but this loss also puts them at 67-40, merely tied for the best record in MLB instead of holding it for themselves.

Also 1.5 games out of a wild-card spot? The Padres, after walking off the Rockies on Tuesday. A significant part of the victory came from the performance of Fernando Tatis Jr., as San Diego’s right fielder and leadoff hitter went 5-for-5 with a run and 2 RBIs in what ended up being a one-run game.

Tatis had a single in the first, then singled in one run — and nearly two, if not for a play at the plate — in the second. He had his third single of the game in the fifth, then came around to score on a hit by third baseman Manny Machado, before collecting his fourth single — and second RBI — in the sixth, tying things up 4-4. Tatis then got his fifth single of the game in the eighth — he might have actually ended up scoring more than once, but on two occasions he was forced out at second in a follow-up at-bat. Here, it was second baseman Jake Cronenworth grounding to second and getting Tatis out, a play that was followed by another Machado RBI single that tied the game 7-7 — yes, multiple plays in a single game where Tatis could have been responsible for what ended up being the winning run, but was not.

Mason Miller came on in relief in the ninth to keep the game tied, and he was successful, striking out all three batters that he faced. In the bottom of the ninth, the Rockies brought in a new pitcher, too, Jimmy Herget, but his inning did not go nearly as efficiently. Center fielder Jackson Merrill led off with a single, then left fielder Luis Rengifo walked. Sung-Mun Song entered as a pinch-hitter and walked to load the bases, bringing shortstop Xander Bogaerts up with the bases loaded and no outs — he didn’t even need a hit here to win the game, and he didn’t get one. A sac fly did the trick.

The Rockies challenged whether the tag-up actually occurred, but the call on the field was upheld — Bogaerts made an out, but he also made the Padres winners. San Diego has now won four in a row and moved back over .500 with the W, and with the Phillies and Pirates both losing, managed to narrow down the distance between itself and a couple of other wild-card contenders in a crowded picture.

You would think that the Angels would have learned to not pitch to Yordan Alvarez at this point. Los Angeles got a pretty good reminder of how dangerous the Astros’ slugging DH is in the first inning on Tuesday, when he bashed his MLB-leading 35th homer to put Houston up 1-0.

Apparently that wasn’t convincing enough, though, so in the top of the ninth, with two outs in a tie game and second base open, the Angels decided to pitch to Alvarez. Yes, Isaac Paredes was right behind him in the order, but Paredes is a pretty good hitter and Alvarez has been the most productive hitter in baseball this season. Like nearly historically so: his 201 OPS+ is the 10th-best of the 21st century so far — sixth-best if you just count the non-Barry Bonds seasons. The entire list is peak Bonds, some Aaron Judge, Sammy Sosa and Juan Soto’s best effort to this point — that’s incredible company, and the Angels could have chosen to walk Alvarez to avoid it. They did not. Guess what happened next?

The Astros got a 3-2 lead, and called upon Josh Hader and his absurdly low ERA to close the door on the Angels. He faced three batters and retired them all, lowering his ERA to 1.23 and picked up his 14th save in 22 innings of work this season. That’s a key win for the Astros, as they kept pace with the Twins and Mariners while gaining a game on the Red Sox and half-a-game on the Guardians in a tightly contested wild-card race. As for the Angels? Well, they still have the AL’s worst record.

The Twins picked up a walk-off win against the Royals, the other team vying to be the AL’s worst. Hey, these are the wins you have to get if you want to be around at season’s end. Kansas City got six quality innings out of starter Seth Lugo, who held Minnesota to a single run and six hits, and then got a couple of scoreless frames out of the bullpen. Alex Lange came on with a chance to pick up a save by closing the door on the Twins in the ninth, and he couldn’t pull it off.

Instead, first baseman Victor Caratini singled to lead off the inning, then third baseman Brooks Lee walked to put the winning run on base. Royce Lewis, who entered as a pinch-hitter earlier in the game and then took over at second base, came to the plate with two outs and the Twins down by a run. He delivered with a triple that came off the bat at nearly 105 mph and traveled 399 feet — that thing just missed being a three-run homer, instead bouncing off the wall and giving Lee time to get home and Lewis to third.

Minnesota has won three in a row and is just two games behind the AL Central-leading White Sox and half-a-game behind the Guardians for a wild-card spot. The W also got the Twins back to .500, which is finally starting to look like the minimum possible threshold for a postseason spot in the AL nearly four months in.

The Reds would lose the first game of a doubleheader against the Guardians on Tuesday, 6-5, but the second? Well, they almost lost that. But almost doesn’t count, as this catch in deep center to end the game reminds.

That was center fielder Dane Myers — who also had one of just two runs scored in the contest — making that leaping grab. The threat and game ended, and the Reds got to undo the damage of their earlier loss in the wild-card standings. Cincinnati is still five games back, though, the furthest out of the teams with a realistic shot at that last NL wild-card spot.

Sure, this is a position player pitching late into the game, but the entirety of the Tigers-Orioles matchup on Tuesday looked a whole lot like this at-bat.

Yes, starter Dean Kremer allowed eight runs in four innings, but this was the kind of problem that every Baltimore pitcher had in this one. The Tigers scored two in the first, three in the second, one in the third and two more in the fourth, ending Kremer’s day. Then Detroit picked up one run each in the fifth and sixth off Albert Suárez, another two in the seventh against Josh Walker and then one more pair of runs in the eighth, this time while facing catcher Chadwick Tromp. 

The Tigers were the home team, so didn’t need to hit in the ninth up 14-0, but chances are good they would have scored there if they had to. Troy Melton gave the Tigers seven innings of scoreless ball with just five total baserunners, then Ty Madden kept the O’s from even getting on base the rest of the way. Besides the final score, the big highlight for Detroit was the return of Javier Báez to the lineup: he went 3-for-4 on the day. He wasn’t the only one with a big performance, of course: rookie shortstop Kevin McGonigle went 4-for-5 with a walk and four runs, while rookie catcher Eduardo Valencia was 4-for-5 with three runs and four RBIs.

The Pirates made a real effort to come back here. Through six innings, Pittsburgh was losing 6-0 to Arizona, but then the Diamondbacks’ pitching began to falter. First baseman Ryan O’Hearn doubled in the Bucs’ first run in the eighth, and Pittsburgh would cut the lead in half by the end of the frame. Then, in the ninth, back-to-back homers by second baseman Brandon Lowe and left fielder Bryan Reynolds tied this game up 6-6.

In extras, Ildemaro Vargas, whose inability to corral a liner at first cost Arizona the game on Monday, drove in the go-ahead run in the 10th. But the Pirates responded with another run in the bottom of the inning, sending things to the 11th. Neither team would score there, but in the top of the 12th the D-backs finally righted their late-game wrongs.

Center fielder Jorge Barrosa bunted lead runner Tyler Locklear to third, putting him 90 feet from being the go-ahead run, then catcher James McCann singled him home. Arizona played for one run and got it, but the Pirates did not have similar luck in the bottom of the 12th. The win keeps the D-backs from losing the first tiebreaker for a wild-card with the Pirates, but they also might have just delayed that: if Pittsburgh wins in the final regular-season contest between the two on Wednesday, then the Pirates have that head-to-head record tiebreaker secured. 

Gerrit Cole probably should have let his catcher handle this one, but hey, he called for it, so it was the Yankee aces’ pop up to catch. And he did. Twice, even!

New York ended up defeating the White Sox, 3-2, with much more from Cole than just this one near not-a-catch. He went six innings scattered four hits and a couple of walks, allowing no runs while striking out seven.

The Marlins ended up beating the Phillies on Monday by taking advantage of a rusty-looking Jhoan Duran in the ninth, but on Tuesday victory was much more straightforward. Miami just didn’t let the Phillies score.

The Marlins scored in the first when first baseman Kyle Stowers hit his 14th homer of the year, but that was it for the entire game, for both teams. Aaron Nola was actually in great form other than that, going 5 ⅔ innings with four strikeouts, three walks and five hits to go with one run allowed, but Sandy Alcantara — and the Marlins’ bullpen — were better. Alcantara threw seven scoreless with five baserunners, and the pen continued his impressive work to keep the shutout going.

Miami is now back at .500 with back-to-back wins following a dozen losses in a row, and two games out of a wild-card spot. The Marlins are now just also three games behind the Phillies in the wild-card standings, owing to those two dubs.

The Tigers scored in every inning, giving us one kind of fun and rare offensive victory, and the Brewers gave us a different one. Every Milwaukee hitter had at least one hit in this one against the Giants, and the first three batters in the lineup — second baseman Brice Turang, left fielder Jackson Chourio and catcher William Contreras — had three, two and two, respectively.

Curiously enough, just Turang and Chourio failed to score, with the other seven batters all doing it once and rookie shortstop Cooper Pratt twice. Turang and Chourio both had a pair of RBIs, though, accounting for half of the team’s total, so it’s not as if their multi-hit games were empty ones.

The win brought the Brewers back into a tie for the best record in MLB this season with the Dodgers, at 67-40 — Milwaukee is also just nine runs behind for the best run differential, so it is rolling once more.