Final Evening in Baseball: With 4 Video games Left, The Yankees And Blue Jays Are Tied

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:

The Yankees caught up to the Blue Jays

Nothing is settled in the American League East, not by a long shot. But they are even with four games to go, as the Yankees won against the White Sox on Wednesday, 8-1, while the Blue Jays were defeated by the Red Sox, again, this time 7-1. New York now sits atop the East, alongside Toronto — the Yankees have one more against the White Sox and then close the season against the Orioles, while the Jays go from the Red Sox to the Rays.

Toronto fell apart basically out of the gate, with starter Max Scherzer allowing three runs to Boston in the first inning. The Sox would add another four throughout, while the Jays waited until the ninth to score their lone run against rookie Payton Tolle, who was just getting a bit of work in. Garrett Crochett threw eight scoreless before then with 6 strikeouts, giving him an MLB-leading 255 for the season. This was a huge W for the Sox, too, as they fight for their own postseason spot: winning on a night that both the Tigers and Astros lost has them two up on Detroit and three up on Houston, with four games left on the schedule. Nothing is settled here, either, but you’d rather play those odds than being up one/two with four to go.

As for the Yankees, it was Aaron Judge’s night: he hit his 50th home run of the season, a 3-run blast, in the third inning to put New York up 3-1. 

Judge then followed that up with his 51st shot in the eighth inning:

A couple of things to note here: 2025 is now Judge’s fourth 50-homer season in his career, tying the MLB record also held by Babe Ruth, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Judge, 33, is in a position to do it again at some point and take that record as his own. The other thing is that the 2025 season now has four 50-homer hitters: Judge, Cal Raleigh, Kyle Schwarber and Shohei Ohtani. It’s just the third time in MLB history that there have been four players with 50 home runs in a single year. And with Eugenio Suarez at 48 dingers with four games to go… well, 2025 might be the first-ever with five of them.

Chourio robs a key homer

The Brewers defeated the Padres 3-1 on Wednesday, and they can thank Jackson Chourio for that. Just 18 pitches into his start, Chad Patrick gave up what looked like a 3-run homer to Xander Bogaerts. Instead, Chourio reeled it in and ended the threat.

With the Dodgers winning, the Padres move to 2.5 back in the NL West — it’s going to be tough for them to take the division lead at this point, especially since Los Angeles holds the tiebreaker.

Guardians take sole possession

The Guardians beat the Tigers again — that’s five in a row now against Detroit after starting the season 3-4 against them — and now sit one game ahead in the AL Central. Remember: Cleveland was 15.5 back of Detroit at one point, and 9.5 back on Sept. 10. Just a wild comeback, but now they’re done playing catch up and have to hold the Central for the next four games.

The two face off for the final time this regular season on Thursday, and then the Guardians will host the Rangers while the Tigers head to Boston to take on the Red Sox. Detroit has been miserable for some time now, but they are, as unbelievable as it might seem, also a little lucky: the Astros can’t seem to get right, either, and remain a game back of Detroit thanks to losing to 6-0 to the Athletics.

Raleigh hits 59 and 60, Mariners win West

Speaking of the Astros, the Mariners won the AL West on Wednesday, and, fittingly, Cal Raleigh played a major part in that. Raleigh, who has powered Seattle’s offense all year — especially before Josh Naylor and Eugenio Suarez showed up to assist at the deadline — hit his 59th and 60th home runs of the year.

Number 60 is historic, as it moved Raleigh into the top 10 for single-season homers, pushing literally Babe Ruth out of there. Well, one Ruth, anyway: Raleigh passed his 1921 season of 59 homers, but is now tied in ninth all-time with Ruth’s legendary 1927, which was at one point the single-season record for homers before Roger Maris surpassed it in 1961.

Raleigh is now three dingers away from passing Aaron Judge’s American League home run record of 62, set in 2022, and the Mariners have their first division title since 2001 — to give you a sense of the time there, Ichiro Suzuki was a rookie on that 116-win Mariners’ team, and he just had his Hall of Fame induction this summer.

Wood hits his 29th and 30th

It’s been a rough second half of the season for Nationals’ All-Star and 22-year-old James Wood, but he reached a milestone on Wednesday despite that. Wood hit home run number 29 and 30 of the season for the first time in his career.

Sure, it’s not a record for the Nationals by any means — this is the organization that had Bryce Harper and Juan Soto before Wood — but it’s still quite impressive. And not just because Wood decided to go 445 feet with the first of them, either.

Skenes was Skenes against the Reds

Paul Skenes vs. Hunter Greene was a real treat on Wednesday, with the aces of the Pirates and Reds, respectively, facing off in a game with playoff implications. Pittsburgh was there to play the role of spoiler, and they did, but only managed it because Skenes was masterful. He threw six innings with 7 strikeouts without giving up a walk, and scattered 3 hits. 

If not for that, the Reds might have won this game: they scored three runs in five innings against pitchers who weren’t Paul Skenes, and with the way Greene was throwing the ball — a pair of runs over six frames, with 7 strikeouts of his own — that kind of pace would have more than sufficed.

Skenes did pitch, though, and dropped his MLB-leading ERA to 1.97 over 187.2 innings. He’s leading the NL in strikeouts with 216, to boot, but because this is the Pirates, they couldn’t hold the lead he’d given them, so he’ll wrap the year at an even 10-10. Fitting, at least. Frustrating! But fitting.

He just knew

Ronald Acuna, everyone.

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