Last Night in Baseball: Rangers Keep Pace With Yankees Thanks to Comeback Win

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:

Rangers comeback

The Rangers aren’t in danger of missing the postseason just yet, since it’s the morning of Aug. 12 and they’re all of 2.5 games back of a wild card spot. However, there are enough other teams clustered around that last wild card — three teams are within four games of it — that it’s important for Texas to win as much as possible, and give themselves the best chance of being the one playing meaningful October baseball. With the Yankees, the team that holds that spot, also winning on Monday, it became that much more vital for the Rangers to keep pace.

And they did! It just took a serious late-game comeback for it to happen. In the bottom of the sixth, the Rangers were down 6-1 to the Diamondbacks. Arizona’s starter, Ryne Nelson, was still on the mound, and he had been cruising to that point: the righty had given up 3 hits, no walks, and struck out 6. Everything began to fall apart here, though, and the Diamondbacks didn’t swap in a reliever quick enough.

A Josh Smith double and Corey Seager single made it 6-2, then Marcus Semien also singled, putting another runner on base for Wyatt Langford. One more swing of the bat made it a 6-5 game.

Arizona’s bullpen would then stop the scoring until the ninth inning, when Rowdy Tellez hit a solo shot to tie things up and send the game to extras.

In the 10th, with Sam Haggerty on third and Seager on second, Jake Burger lofted a ball all the way to the wall in left field, completing the comeback and giving Texas the W.

The Rangers are 61-59, 2.5 games back of a wild card spot, but they also have a +60 run differential that suggests they should have a much better record than that: their expected record, per MLB’s calculations, is 67-53, which would have them half-a-game back of the AL West-leading Astros and in possession of the top wild card spot. There’s still time to make up for this underperforming summer, and it’s going to take smaller comebacks like Monday’s to achieve the larger one they’ve got their eyes on.

Ohtani homers in third-straight game

Shohei Ohtani’s 2024 season, in which he hit 54 homers, ranks first all-time among Dodgers. In fact, he’s the only Dodgers player to ever collect 50 homers in a season: Shawn Green’s 2001, in which he hit 49, had stood as the record for over two decades, and before that was Duke Snider’s 43 from 1956, which Gary Sheffield tied the year before Green’s offensive explosion. Ohtani went deep on Monday — his third-straight game with a homer — for his 42nd of the year, which has him tied for the seventh-most by a Dodgers’ hitter.

He might very well own the top two spots on this list by year’s end, in just his second year with Los Angeles. And if Ohtani does get to 50 homers again, he’ll be just the 11th player in MLB to have achieved the feat more than once.

This wasn’t enough to give the Dodgers their first win over the Angels in 2025, however: they’d lose 7-4, allowing the Padres to cut Los Angeles’ lead in the NL West to a single game.

Bregman spoils the Houston homecoming

Alex Bregman signed with the Red Sox over the offseason after previously spending his entire career with the Astros. In his return to Houston on Monday, the crowd cheered him in his first at-bat and gave him a standing ovation, as a show of appreciation for what he accomplished while in an Astros uniform. Bregman responded by hitting a home run to give the Red Sox an early lead.

In the third inning, Bregman came to the plate again. The crowd reacted just a little bit differently this time around.

And not just before the first pitch, but sustained booing, too! All in good fun, of course. The crowd liked Bregman enough to cheer him, they maybe just didn’t want to encourage him to hit a second homer against their team, which is no longer his team.

Bregman’s return wasn’t the only homecoming, either. This marked Carlos Correa’s first appearance in Houston since the Astros picked him up from the Twins at the trade deadline: they’ve been on the road since Aug. 1. The crowd was thrilled to see him, too! And, of course, for more than one at-bat.

In the end, Bregman’s homer didn’t make a difference, as the Astros would end up winning 7-6, with Correa scoring a run and driving in another. The W allowed Houston to stay in first place in the AL West, and bump their lead over the Mariners by half-a-game to a full one.

Schwarber matches Ohtani

On a night when Ohtani hit his 42nd homer of the year, so did Phillies’ slugger Kyle Schwarber. The pair each hit three homers last week, too, so they’ve been fairly in sync on the long balls of late.

This one had to be reviewed to ensure it actually stayed fair, but it didn’t lack for distance: Schwarber hit it where the fence at Great American Ballpark is just 328 feet out, but it landed 404 feet from home plate.

Schwarber is chasing 50 homers, which would be a career-first, but he’s also attempting to reach Ryan Howard’s franchise record of 58 homers, set in 2006. Bombs like that one are going to help him get there in a hurry.

Hayes fooled the camera

Ke’Bryan Hayes made a hell of a play at third base for the Reds against the Phillies, to the point that the camera was fooled. JT Realmuto hit a grounder to third down the line, and so far down the line and deep into third base territory that the camera just assumed it had gotten by Hayes and into left field. It had not, though: he had not only snared it, but was setting up for a strong throw to first to get Realmuto.

Hayes’ bat hasn’t improved since getting to Cincinnati at the deadline, but the defense is as good as it’s ever been.

Strikeout? Strikeout.

It’s a little difficult to tell what happened here until you see the slowed down replay, but that’s what words are for. In the fifth inning, Rays‘ hurler Ryan Pepiot threw an 88 mph pitch outside the strike zone to shortstop Darell Hernaiz, which he swung through and missed. Except the ball didn’t end up in the glove of catcher Nick Forte — it got caught in between his arm and his body.

The ball hadn’t touched the ground yet, though, so it wasn’t a dropped third strike. When it popped out of Forte’s side as he bobbled it a bit, he caught it in his glove, securing the K.

Hernaiz was a little confused about what had happened, and Athletics’ manager Mark Kotsay wanted to know, too, but the ump saw it all happen and made the right call.

That’s 10 in a row for the Brewers

Not a lot of drama in Monday’s win against the Pirates for the Brewers, as they struck first with a run in the opening inning, then added 4 more in the third. Starting pitcher Jose Quintana did his part with 6 innings of 1-run ball, and then the bullpen shut Pittsburgh down the rest of the way. Three Brewers had two hits each, and just one of the starting lineup — Caleb Durbin — went hitless, but he contributed in other ways. Durbin was hit by not one but two pitches, and had a sacrifice bunt in the third that helped set up a later run.

The Brewers already had MLB’s best record heading into Monday’s game, and after defeating the Pirates, 7-1, they’re now at 74-44. That’s 10 in a row for Milwaukee, their second streak of at least that many games in 2025 — they won 11 in a row just last month, so recently that just eight games were played in between the end of that streak and their current one.

This team might be pretty good at baseball, you guys.

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