Final Night time in Baseball: The Reds Sweep Whereas Mets Slip Out of Playoff Spot

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:

Reds sweep into a wild card

The Reds have looked dead more than once in 2025, but two things happened over the weekend that have them not only back in it, but in possession of a wild card spot. For one, they swept the Cubs over the weekend, with Sunday’s victory a 1-0 win over Chicago. Gavin Lux drove in a run in the third, and then it was on the pitching the rest of the way.

Starter Andrew Abbott wasn’t at his very best, lasting just 4.2 innings with all of 2 strikeouts over 86 pitches, but he managed to scatter 5 hits and 1 walk and avoid giving up any runs. The Reds’ bullpen handled business from there on out, giving up just one more hit — and more importantly, no runs — to Chicago the rest of the way.

The W gave the Reds their 80th win of the season, and, per Baseball Reference, bumped their postseason odds up to 31%. As for that second thing? Time to shift to perspective, to…

…the Mets’ fall

The Mets might have the same record as the Reds, at 80-76, but they do not have possession of the third and final wild card spot in the National League. That’s because Cincinnati has the tiebreaker, and as a result New York is chasing a playoff spot for the first time since April 4. 

They have just six games left — three against the Cubs, who have already clinched a postseason spot, and then three against the Marlins to finish the season. The Reds are in a similar situation, with one tough opponent and one they should beat, only in the reverse order: they take on the Pirates before facing the Brewers. While Milwaukee is MLB’s best this year, they might also be resting players a bit and setting their rotation for the postseason by the final weekend of the year, too. Not that they would no longer be a threat to the Reds by any means, but it’s the kind of subtle change that could make all the difference in the end in a race this tight.

New York won on Friday against the Nationals, but Saturday saw them lose thanks to an extra-innings inside-the-park home run…

And on Sunday? Well. Jacob Young deserves his own section for that one. But to put a bow on this one, the Mets didn’t win that game, either, against the second-worst team in the National League, and now they find themselves without possession of a postseason spot.

Just don’t hit it to Young

Here’s that aforementioned Jacob Young spotlight. We have seen plenty of catches bobbled and then recovered before they hit the ground in 2025, but Young’s grab from Sunday trumps them all. Why? Because he used his foot to keep the ball catchable. It’s difficult to see from the initial angle…

…but once you get that side view, you see that he not only caught the ball and had it pop out of his glove without it touching the wall, but he also kicked it back up in the air and kept it from hitting the ground, too, giving the center fielder a second chance at making the out.

Even funnier — well, not if you’re a Mets fan — is that Young had another great catch later on, but it looks pretty ho-hum in comparison given his previous one is one of the best of the entire season.

The Nationals ended up winning 3-2 in a game where Young did this to the Mets — obviously, more went on in the game than this, and more went wrong for New York than this, but it’s pretty easy to point a finger at Young here in terms of short-term damage done to the Mets’ playoff hopes.

Trout’s 400th

Mike Trout had a bit of a power outage to get from career home run 398 to 399, as he’s struggled a bit with a bone bruise in his knee, but he jumped to 400 in eight more games. Trout is just the 59th player in MLB history to get to 400 career homers, and he made this one a titanic shot — this thing went 485 feet. 

Even better is that Trout got the ball back from the fan who caught it, in exchange for something pure: a game of catch with Trout himself.

How many home runs will Trout end up with in his career? It’s tough to guess, but just to give a sense of difficulty and rarity, Giancarlo Stanton’s 450th over the weekend made him just the 41st player to hit that many. All of 28 players have ever hit 500 — just 15 have reached 550. Trout is 34, and often dealing with injury or missing time. Maybe we’ll all be blessed with some better health and get to see him hit massive shots like that one more often in the future, but if not, getting to 400 is quite the feat regardless.

Raleigh passes Griffey

Cal Raleigh has done it: he’s set another new homer record in a year already full of them. His 57th blast of the year passed Ken Griffey Jr. for the most in a single season in Mariners history — Griffey pulled that off twice with Seattle, in 1997 and 1998.

And then Raleigh hit another one for good measure, too. His season isn’t over just because Griffey is in his rear view, you know.

Raleigh has six games left — including three against Rockies’ pitching — to push this even further. His 58th homer was a notable one, in that it put him in a six-way tie for 12th-place all-time on the single-season leaderboard, with Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg, Ryan Howard, Aaron Judge and Mark McGwire. One more puts him in a tie for the 10th-most with Babe Ruth and Giancarlo Stanton — four more ties him for the single-season AL record that Judge set in 2022. It would take one hell of a week to get there, but again: Rockies pitching.

Guardians catch the Astros

The Guardians had their 10-game winning streak snapped over the weekend, but the Tigers couldn’t capitalize on that: Detroit has lost six games in a row now, meaning that they are just one game up on Cleveland before the two face off for a three-game series that begins on Tuesday. The Guardians are sitting in a tie for the final wild card in the AL with the Astros, as both teams are 84-72. Like with the Reds and Mets situation, the Guardians hold the tiebreaker over the Astros — as of this moment, they are in the postseason. But there are six games to play, and things can shake out a number of ways before we know that for sure.

Things can get complicated for Houston even if the Tigers end up ceding the AL Central the Guardians — Detroit controls the tiebreaker with Houston, so if they don’t have a straight-up better record than one of the Guardians or Tigers before this week ends, then they miss the postseason. The Guardians have three against the Tigers and then three against the Rangers, while Detroit faces the Red Sox — who as of Monday morning have the same 85-71 record as the Tigers — to finish their season. The Astros wrap against the Athletics and Angels, two teams that might not have playoff aspirations but can certainly play the role of spoiler. It’s going to be a wild last week of the season for these three clubs… and four, if the Red Sox can’t get some much-needed separation going to get them out of being any further involved in this three-team mess than the schedule dictates.

One thing we do know for sure? José Ramírez made it to the 30 home run, 30 steals club again, for the third time. 

Watch out for him reaching the 300-300 mark for his career in 2026 — just eight players before Ramírez have ever managed to get to that point, and he’s at 285 long balls and 283 steals.

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