Last Night in Baseball: Christian Yelich (somehow) hit his first walk-off homer

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The Red Sox, meanwhile, have dropped four straight, are 27-30, and are the same 3.5 games back of a wild card as Milwaukee, only in the American League, but it’s safe to say the vibes feel a whole lot different. That’ll happen when you’re nearing the end of a month in which you’ve gone 11-15, following up a month in which you underperformed a little but showed promise with one where things got a whole lot worse instead.

The Indy 500 winner threw out a first pitch

Two days after winning the 109th running of the Indianapolis 500, Álex Palou threw out the first pitch before the New York Mets game against the Chicago White Sox. Don’t worry, there wasn’t any weird gimmick where Palou drove the first pitch down from the mound to the backstop. That wouldn’t have been super cool to rig up and make happen at all, even if it destroyed the infield a little in the process. Just a regular old first pitch here, nothing involving an INDYCAR or any car or the Indy 500 outside of seeing the winner flash his championship ring.

What we’re saying (while pouting) is that someone should have at least dunked themselves in milk after the first pitch was caught. Get in the spirit of things, New York!

Ohtani homers for the third straight game

On Monday night, Shohei Ohtani took the major-league home run lead with a leadoff shot against the Guardians, his second such dinger in as many days. on Tuesday, Ohtani became the first player to hit 20 home runs during the 2025 season with a bomb to left off of Tanner Bibee. 

Do you know what’s always fun? Well, when it isn’t happening to your team, anyway. When everyone knows a ball is gone, immediately. The batter knows, the pitcher knows, and the outfielder giving chase doesn’t want to know, but eventually, their body language betrays what they always knew to be the truth. That ball was gone the second it left the bat, and all that was left was waiting for the rest of reality to catch up to that fact.

Ohtani admires the ball, Bibee turns and stares with the kind of resignation so many pitchers before have felt, and Steven Kwan tracks it until he comes to a halt, his shoulders droop and he gives up the impossible chase. Not every homer is the same, you see. Some are more deflating than others. 

The Dodgers would win, 9-5, with Ohtani failing to record another hit on the evening, but he did walk twice and come around to score a second time. 

Judge and Schwarber fall behind Big Dumper

While we’re talking the long ball, Aaron Judge and Kyle Schwarber were tied with Ohtani for the lead in homers after Sunday’s games, then fell to second place with his shot on Monday. Now, they find themselves tied for third, still at 18, and behind Mariners‘ catcher Cal Raleigh. Big Dumper went deep twice on Tuesday against the Nationals, and if you want to talk about balls everyone knows are gone the second they hit the bat, well. Here you go.

That first homer was a second-deck blast, and it was gone. The second was different – more of a laser to left – and it was hit hard in a different way, as it got out of the park in a hurry.

Raleigh hit both home runs from the right side of the plate, giving him eight for the year against lefties. You might recall that Raleigh is utilizing a torpedo bat, but he’s only doing that from the left side of the plate – that’s more often, given there are far more right-handed pitchers than left-handed ones, but his plan to split things up based on the way he swings and attacks has worked out wonderfully for him. He’s batting .240/.392/.560 with 11 home runs from the left side of the plate, and .290/.329/.681 with 8 from the right. A lot is going well for the Mariners to be 30-23 and in first place in the AL West, but nothing is going better for them than this leap forward by Big Dumper.

Things got weird for San Diego

The Padres won against the Marlins on Tuesday, but it didn’t come easily, nor in a normal way. Starter Stephen Kolek gave up six runs in the first inning to Miami, but was not pulled from the game because it was basically death by a thousand paper cuts, where the paper cuts were seeing-eye singles. He (and the Padres’ defense, and also whatever cosmic dice were rolling in the first inning) would then buckle down, and hold the Marlins scoreless for the next 4.1 innings, at which point the bullpen took over and did the same for the rest of the game. 

The Padres, meanwhile, slowly chipped away at the lead. A run in the first, two in the second and third each, then they tied it up in the fourth, erasing the looming L from Kolek’s night even if San Diego couldn’t eventually finish the job. They did, however, scoring again in the fifth, then added an insurance run in the eighth – they’d win 8-6, and Kolek himself would pick up the W despite the six-run first. 

As MLB.com noted, Kolek is the first pitcher to pull this off since Mark Buehrle gave up six runs in the first in 2006, and the first to do it with all of those runs being earned since Bartolo Colon managed the feat back in 1999. 

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