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:
4 Schwarbombs! 4 of them!
Kyle Schwarber entered play on Thursday night with 46 homers, one behind his career-high set back in 2023. He then tied that mark in the first inning with a 450-foot, second-deck laser to right field.
That thing got out of there in a hurry. Three innings later, with the Phillies already up 8-3, Schwarber came up with a runner on second base, and delivered another home run. A new career-high of 48 homers! This one just missed the second deck, but it was more of a moonshot, anyway.
Schwarber was not done. Philadelphia was up 12-3 in the fifth inning, and Schwarber came up with two runners on this time, and hit a ball the opposite way, once again for a homer. A solo shot, a 2-run dinger and a 3-run jack. Schwarber was approaching the long ball version of a cycle, with four innings to go.
He wouldn’t get there, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. The Phillies just didn’t put the required number of baserunners on for him in the seventh inning — Schwarber hit a fourth homer, another 3-run job, to put Philadelphia up 18-4.
Even more stunning is that Schwarber very well could have had a fifth blast. He was just the fourth player ever, per Elias, to get a chance at a fifth home run in a game, after Bobby Lowe, Lou Gehrig and Mike Cameron — and none of those three actually hit a fifth home run. Position player Vidal Brujan was on the mound for the Braves at this point, given the lopsided affair, and he got Schwarber to pop out on a 55-mph pitch that was right down the pipe.
A real shame, as it not only would have been the first-ever 5-homer game, but Schwarber had already set a club record for RBIs with 9: another 3 there would have been an even more difficult feat for someone to match down the line.
Still! Schwarber’s four homers gave him an NL-leading 49 for the year, which is not only a new career-high for him with a month of the season to go, but also the second-most in Phillies’ history. With his first homer of the evening, Schwarber tied his own 2022 for the eighth-most in club history, his second tied him with Ryan Howard’s 2007 and Jim Thome’s 2003 for the fifth-most, his third brought him even with Howard’s 2008 and Mike Schmidt’s 1980, and, finally, his fourth blast gave him sole possession of second all-time among Phillies. With 28 games left in the season, Howard’s 58 long balls from 2006 is all that stands ahead of Schwarber.
Premeditated robbery
You can tell, just by the way players move out there in the outfield waiting for a chance to rob a home run these days, that they are practicing this sort of thing. Like NBA players deciding halfcourt buzzer beaters are worth playing around with just in case the moment arrives where they actually get to fire one off, MLB’s outfielders are preparing for the moment where they get to routinely do what was once considered a more special and rare occurrence.
Brewers’ center fielder Blake Perkins has your latest example.
It’s how in control of the situation he is that gives it away. This man has practiced. He’s not panicking: he’s calculating, he’s putting a plan into action. It’s beautiful, and makes what should not be a routine play look extremely routine.
Giants complete sweep, walk off Cubs
The Cubs took their good vibes from stopping the seemingly unstoppable Brewers in their tracks, and… well if they knew where they had left them things would feel a little different right now. They aren’t in any danger of losing a postseason spot, by any means, not with the Dodgers sweeping the Reds, but getting swept by the Giants can’t feel great.
Chicago dropped the first game of the series, 5-2, but got whalloped in the second, 12-3. Thursday’s affair was a closer one, with the Cubs actually ahead briefly in the sixth inning, but San Francisco then tied thing up with a Willy Adames homer, and then hit a walk-off in the ninth, courtesy a Jung Hoo Lee single.
As said, the Cubs are still in a great place. They’re leading the NL wild cards, and their recent non-Giants play has them eight games up on the Reds at this point. The hope that they might put it together and surpass the Brewers in the NL Central after taking four of five from them a couple of series back, however, has been diminished: Chicago couldn’t take advantage of Milwaukee dropping their own series this week, and actually fell back a little further in the standings in the process, to 6.5 back.
It’s not an impossible task by any means, but they have a lot of work to do between now and the end of the regular season if they want to wrest the Central back from the Brewers, and this series did not help matters.
That’s not on Devers
Rafael Devers needs to work on his defense at first base, sure, but this one is not his fault.
The ball went straight through the netting of his glove! You can’t replicate that one easily even if you tried.
Crocheted
Garrett Crochet struck out 209 batters for the White Sox in 2024, and he entered Thursday afternoon’s game against the Orioles with a chance to set a new career-high with plenty of season left to go. The Red Sox’ ace would strike out 7 batters against no walks, finishing the day with 214 strikeouts for the year.
Crochet has been a force this season: he’s leading the AL in innings with 172.1 — another career-high — and his 214 strikeouts are tops in the majors. He’s 14-5, for those who care about pitcher wins, but more important is that he’s put up 5.6 wins above replacement: he has a genuine chance at a Cy Young, with Tarik Skubal his greatest competition. Skubal’s 2.28 ERA is why Crochet isn’t leading the AL at 2.40, and he’s just 6.1 innings and two strikeouts behind Boston’s top starter, too.
The Red Sox would win, by the way, by a score of 3-2, putting them 25 games over .500 on the season. They sit 3.5 back of the Blue Jays for first in the AL East, and are half-a-game up on the Yankees for the top wild card spot. They take on the Pirates and NL Cy Young favorite Paul Skenes on Friday.
Yankees win 5th straight
Speaking of the Yankees, New York has been a streaky team of late. They won five in a row, then were nearly swept by the Red Sox over the weekend in a four-game series, and are back to a five-game winning streak again that started with a W against Boston. Thursday’s dub was one with authority, as they took down the White Sox, 10-4, starting off a four-game series against the AL’s worst team the right way.
This is a series that New York has to dominate — the Sox are facing the Pirates, so they have an opponent on the easier side themselves outside of the Skenes matchup, and if they are to have any real chance of taking the division back from the Blue Jays, it has to start with taking down the teams they absolutely should not be losing series to. Getting 5 innings out of Adam Warren, and having the bullpen shut Chicago down the rest of the way, is exactly what needs to be happening in those kinds of games. In fact, better pitching is what’s driven New York to what should be their first winning record in a month since May: they have scored 138 runs in August, same as they did in July, but the difference is they have allowed just 112 to this point compared to last month’s 151.
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