There is always baseball happening — almost too much baseball for one person to handle themselves.
That’s why we’re here to help, though, by sifting through the previous days’ games, and figuring out what you missed, but shouldn’t have. Here are all the best moments from the weekend in Major League Baseball:
Pirates demolish Mets in weekend sweep
The Mets have had better weekends. The Mets have also had better weeks, and better months. On Friday, they lost 9-1 to the Pirates, with Pittsburgh scoring four runs in the second off of starter David Peterson and then never looking back. Saturday was more of the same, with the Bucs putting three on the board in the second inning, once again enough to win on its own — the runs continued from there, though, and Pittsburgh took the second game of the series 9-2.
A team meeting following that defeat didn’t stop the bleeding, either, with the Pirates completing the sweep courtesy of a 12-1 victory that saw them score five first-inning runs. Sunday’s loss was the Mets’ 13th in their last 16 contests, and dropped them to a 12-15 record for June. The high point of their season was in the same month, too: after a June 12 win against the Nationals — their sixth in a row! — they achieved their largest lead in the NL East of the season, 5.5 games. Now, New York is lucky that the Phillies have run into their own little pain stretches rather than taking the opportunity to run away with the division while the Mets step on every rake in sight, but the result is still the Phillies gaining seven games in the standings since June 12: they now sit 1.5 up on New York in the NL East.
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Obviously, given the 30-4 drubbing at the hands of the Pirates of all teams, the pitching staff falling apart has been a problem. The rotation has a 6.22 ERA over the last 16 games, and that, as a unit, they’ve allowed 5.6 walks per nine in that stretch is killing them. Pitchers are allowing too many extra baserunners because they can’t find the strike zone, and the lack of efficiency is causing them to last for a cumulative average of 4.1 innings per start: Mets’ starters made made it through the fifth inning in just five of those 16 games, and past the fifth in just one of them.
The offense has done little to pick them up in that time. They’re hitting .229/.286/.374 over these 16 games, as well, and they’ve been especially ineffective against opposing bullpens in this run, too: in the seventh, eighth and ninth innings, they’ve posted OPS of .509, .555 and .582 since June 13. All small samples, yes, but this is just identifying where the failure points have been, not where they’re going to continue to be.
Whatever the issue is, the Mets need it to end: the Phillies are a dangerous team, and there’s no guarantee they’ll sputter and falter again like they’ve already endured in 2025. Especially not with Bryce Harper now nearing a return after missing almost the entire month of June.
Speaking of slides
At least this is one to be proud of instead of the kind you look back on while pinpointing where everything went sideways. White Sox’ shortstop Chase Meidroth, while attempting to avoid a tag, somehow managed a fake out that allowed him to throw second baseman Brett Wisely off balance, literally:
How baseball continues to innovate after well over a century is part of what makes it so easy to come back again and again. Watch long enough, and you’ll manage to see something new way more often than you’d believe.
Judge goes deep twice
Yankees’ slugger Aaron Judge is now up to 30 homers on the season after going deep twice on Sunday. He’s still two behind Mariners’ catcher Cal Raleigh for the MLB lead, but has at least been able to close that gap a little bit while Raleigh’s bat cools off after an unfathomably torrid run in the middle of the month.
That makes for the sixth 30-plus homer campaign of Judge’s career, as well, and he’s still got about half of it left to play, as that was the Yankees’ 83rd game of the season. He might not have the MLB home run lead, no, but Judge is leading the majors in wins above replacement (5.9), hits (110), batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage (.356/.458/.722) and OPS (1.180), as well as OPS+ (125) and intentional walks (18). So things are going pretty well, despite this one hardship.
Wood’s Barry Bonds’ impression
While we’re sort of on the subject of intentional walks, Nationals’ budding star James Wood put on a rare show on Sunday. Well, not by choice: he was intentionally walked four times, which hasn’t happened since Barry Bonds roamed the Earth all the way back in 2004.
Wood joins a small group that includes Bonds as well as Roger Maris, Gary Templeton and Manny Ramirez, though, he fell one intentional pass shy of the record: Andre Dawson was intentionally walked five times in one game back in 1990.
Schwellenbach Ks a dozen Phillies
Spencer Schwellenbach is the reason that the Phillies aren’t even further ahead of the Mets after their horrific weekend against the Pirates. The Braves starter has been on a heater lately, and on Saturday, it reached its peak: Schwellenbach struck out a career-high 12 batters in seven innings.
He’d reached 11 multiple times earlier in the season, in a stretch including his last seven starts. You can probably infer given these three appearances how he’s been doing lately, but it’s fun to look at that whole stretch all the same: a 2.55 ERA with 59 strikeouts in 49.1 innings (with 99 swing-and-miss pitches) against just six walks. The six homers aren’t ideal, sure, but Schwellenbach has gotten away with them by limiting baserunners — in addition to the half-dozen free passes, he’s also allowed just 6.6 hits per nine in this run.
Skubal struck out 7 in a row, and didn’t stop there
Somehow, Schwellenbach’s start didn’t even feature the most strikeouts of the weekend. That honor instead goes to Tigers‘ ace Tarik Skubal, who shoved. The reigning AL Cy Young winner struck out eight of the first nine batters he faced, including seven in a row, and finished his start against the Twins with 13 punch outs in seven innings of work.
Skubal didn’t just miss bats, though: he walked one batter, gave up a hit to another, and held Minnesota scoreless. He struck out every hitter in the Twins’ lineup at least once, and ended his start with a 99.7 mph called strike to Ty France, who’d picked up that aforementioned hit against him earlier. His ERA for the season is now 2.15, or, even lower than last year’s AL-leading 2.39 mark, and he’s seen his walk rate drop and strikeout increase, the latter to 11.4 per nine, best in the American League.
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