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Having a tough time following along with the MLB postseason? Just want to relive the best moments?
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:
What a terrible way to end a season
The Phillies were great in 2025. They won the NL East, despite the Mets bringing in Juan Soto over the winter and having him be, you know. Juan Soto. Kyle Schwarber hit the 50-homer mark for the first time in his career, Trea Turner won the NL batting title, the team picked up instant fan favorite Harrison Bader at the trade deadline and the rotation was ridiculous.
That all came to an end with one play in Game 4 of the NLDS, though.
Reliever Orion Kerkering misplayed and then threw away a ball hit right to him in extra innings, allowing Hyeseong Kim to score the game- and series-winning run from third base. The Phillies went from having a realistic chance of forcing a Game 5 back in Philadelphia to having their season end, just like that. The Dodgers now wait to see which of the Brewers or Cubs they will face in the National League Championship Series.
Prior to this, Game 4 was not action-packed. Which is not to say it was boring — this was a pitcher’s duel between Cristopher Sanchez and Tyler Glasnow, with the latter throwing six scoreless innings before he was lifted for Emmet Sheehan, who then allowed an RBI double to Nick Castellanos to score Max Kepler and give the Phillies the 1-0 lead.
As for Sanchez, he walked Alex Call and gave up a single to Enrique Hernandez in the seventh, and was lifted with one out in favor of closer Jhoan Duran. Duran just didn’t have it, though — Andy Pages moved the runners over with a ground out, Shohei Ohtani was intentionally walked to both avoid him and to setup a force at every base, and then Duran walked Mookie Betts, tying the game.
Both offenses went silent from that point forward and the game went into extras — would the soft underbelly of the Dodgers’ bullpen be exposed, giving the Phillies a chance to bring the series back home? That’s probably how things would have gone down eventually after Roki Sasaki wrapped three brilliant innings in relief and could no longer be called on, but before Dave Roberts was forced to go back to Blake Treinen or anything like that, Kerkering misfired, and the Phillies’ hopes were dashed.
It is not Kerkering’s fault, of course — the throw is, yes, but the throw never would have even happened if not for decisions made elsewhere, for failed attempts at driving in runners, if not for that bunt — that horribly executed bunt that also never should have happened in the first place — in Game 2 that likely cost the Phillies a win. The throw was the exclamation point on a series that Philadelphia never quite got a handle on — sometimes, the other team is better, and sometimes, a team does not help its own cause. Whether the first part is true is tougher to definitively state here, but the second is pretty clear.
The Cubs are still alive!
The Brewers trounced the Cubs in the first two games of the NLDS, to the point that it looked like a sweep or gentleman’s sweep was almost an inevitability. The fun thing about a five-game series, though, is that baseball is just chaos that our brains attempt to make some futile sense of while it’s on our screens. The Cubs scored four runs in the first inning of Game 3 and then nothing else while holding the Brewers to just three runs, forcing a Game 4. And in Game 4, Chicago put up three runs in the first on an Ian Happ home run:
And then scored one run each in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings to go up 6-0. Which was also the final score, as the Brewers’ bats did not ever wake up at Wrigley, where they were outscored 10-3 across two games.
Now what? Game 5 is on Saturday, and it’s back in Milwaukee. Who is starting the Cubs? That’s unknown as of now. How about for the Brewers? Also unknown! Who will win? That’s the real question, and it certainly feels like a coin flip even more than these things just inherently are sometimes. That’s chaos, baby. That’s playoff baseball.
As for Friday…
Cubs-Brewers is a win-or-go-home Game 5, sure, but you don’t have to wait until Saturday to get your taste of that. Friday’s schedule features just one game: the Mariners will host the Tigers in Seattle, for their own decisive Game 5. Detroit won Game 1, then Seattle took the next two — the Tigers then rallied back and had a statement win in Game 4 to force this game on the Mariners.
Detroit will send AL Cy Young hopeful — and last year’s Cy Young winner — Tarik Skubal to the mound to face George Kirby. Skubal’s credentials are obvious and clear, while Kirby is more of an enigma. He’s capable of being just as terrifyingly dominant as Skubal, as evidenced by the pair of 14-strikeout games in 2025, as well as allowing two runs or fewer in 15 of his 23 starts, and three runs or fewer in 16 of them. The question is if that’s the Kirby that Seattle will get, or if it will be the one who fell somewhere between “not good” and “absolutely torched” in the other seven starts.
That’s why we watch the games, folks. And you can watch this one on FOX at 8:08 p.m. ET on Friday night.
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