Last Night in Baseball: A Weekend For Sweeps

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 Astros are spiraling The Astros missed the 2025 postseason thanks to injuries derailing what should have been yet another season with October baseball in it. Losing slugger Yordan Alvarez for most of the year, combined with IL trips for star shortstop Jeremy Pena, didn’t help matters in a season when the Mariners were a force to be reckoned with and the Rangers were hanging around until the end. Now, Alvarez is back and hitting as well as he ever has. The rest of the Astros? Well. You saw the subhed. The Mariners dropped Houston 9-6 on Friday to open the weekend series between the two, and then Saturday started out promising but didn’t deliver. Center fielder Taylor Trammell went yard in the top of the second to give Houston a 3-2 lead… …and then Alvarez hit a solo shot — his sixth home run of the year — to give Houston another run. Alvarez, by the way, is batting ..340/.500/.755 and leading the American League in dingers, so, safe to say he’s feeling better than last summer. The Astros ended up chasing Mariners’ starter Luis Castillo after 3.1 innings, scoring seven runs against him in that short time frame. Houston would not score once against the Seattle bullpen — not even the runner they inherited from Castillo. This gave the Mariners time to claw their way back, and Seattle did just that: a five-run fifth inning, capped by center fielder Julio Rodriguez hitting a two-run homer, tied the game up 7-7. The Mariners would then keep the game from going to extras with a walk-off single from shortstop J.P. Crawford in the bottom of the ninth, giving the Astros their sixth-straight defeat and second loss in the series. And then Houston lost again to the Mariners on Sunday, 6-1. The weekend was maybe best exemplified by this one play from Sunday’s tilt. The Astros just didn’t have an answer for the Mariners all weekend, even when things were seemingly going well. Houston is now 6-10; they will have to find an answer eventually, and not just for Seattle. Yankees lose fifth-straight On April 7, the Yankees defeated the Athletics, 5-3, to move to 8-2 on the season. For the second time in this early campaign, New York responded to a loss with a W, but that would also be the only game that the Yankees would win against the A’s. The Athletics would hand New York Ls in the next two games and the series, and then the Yankees went to Tampa Bay hoping for some respite against the Rays. They did not get it. Tampa Bay swept the Yankees, even if right fielder Aaron Judge tried to change as much late in Sunday’s contest with a dinger. New York has dropped five-straight after having just two losses all season prior to this stretch. The Yankees have lost these five games by a combined six runs, as they allowed 19 against 13 scored during this stretch: New York hasn’t been dominated here, so much as just lose close games. Against the A’s, 3-2 and 1-0 defeats, and facing Tampa Bay, 5-3, then 5-4 in consecutive contests. Per the YES Network, the 2026 Yankees are just the fourth team since 1900 to go 0-6 in one-run games through the first 15 games of a season. That’s a freak occurrence, a real rarity. That’s not to excuse New York’s performance, by any means — a loss is a loss in the standings, and this not only puts the Rays even with New York despite dissimilar starts to the season, but lets the Blue Jays off the hook to a degree for their poor 6-9 start. There is a ton of season left for all parties involved, however, and these sorts of things happen, but we won’t know the true impact of this particular stretch for some time yet — if the Yankees start winning all their many winnable games again, maybe none of it matters five months from now. And if not, well. Those other three teams that all went 0-6 in one-run games to start the year finished well under .500. None of them were necessarily supposed to be as good as New York, though, so they are at least better-positioned for a turnaround than their historical counterparts. A’s sweep Mets The Athletics didn’t manage to sweep the Yankees — even if they came close — but managed to finish the job against a team from New York. The Mets have been without superstar outfielder Juan Soto for their last eight games, and while that didn’t matter so much for the first three of those, over the last five New York is missing his bat. They won 4-3 against the Diamondbacks to open their previous series, earning a walk-off to seal the W, but then scored three total runs against Arizona in the next two games. Over three contests with the A’s, the Mets scored six combined runs — and all of those in one game. The other two were shutouts. Sunday’s loss stung the most, as it was a 1-0 defeat that included this excellent play from center fielder Carson Benge that kept a pair of runs from scoring. Nine runs in five games isn’t going to cut it, but it’s not like it’s just the offense that’s been a problem here. Unlike with the Yankees getting swept, nothing is working here for the Mets: they have been outscored 30-9 in these five games. Just getting Soto back isn’t going to fix that issue, as New York’s pitching needs to get it together again. Thanks to dropping five in a row, the Mets are now 7-9, last in the NL East. Enough about the Mets, though. The A’s had themselves a great weekend. Nick Kurtz, Athletics first baseman and 2025 AL Rookie of the Year, hit his first homer of the season to give them the one run needed to down the Mets. Right-hander Aaron Civale had another strong start for a rotation that needed it, going 5.2 scoreless with just three strikeouts, sure, but no walks and four hits allowed. Oh, and the day before, the A’s might have given up six runs, but they scored 11. So that worked out just fine. It’s April 13 and all that, but the A’s are in first place in the AL West thanks to rattling off five wins in a row. Nats sweep Brewers for first time in years Now here’s something you don’t see every day. Specifically, not since 2011, when Nationals slugger James Wood was still eight years old. The Brewers were swept by Washington in a three-game set, winning 7-3, 3-1 and then 8-6 in an exciting back-and-forth finale. Brewers’ second baseman Brice Turang kicked off the scoring with a solo homer in the third, then the aforementioned right fielder Wood answered with a dinger of his own to tie it up. Shortstop CJ Abrams drove in another with a sac fly, but Milwaukee tied it up again with a homer from first baseman Jake Bauers in the bottom of the fourth, then Turang went yard again in the fifth to make it 3-2 Brewers. Then, in the seventh, the Nats scored three runs: on a pair of pinch-hit singles by Jose Tena and Curtis Mead, then Wood managed to nab home as part of a double-steal to make it 5-3. DH Brady House would single in yet another run, scoring Mead. That was a lot of work to get three runs — Milwaukee managed to even things up again with a single swing from DH Gary Sanchez, who had entered the game earlier as a pinch-hitter himself. The Nats weren’t done, however. In the top of the eighth, Keibert Ruiz — a catcher who entered into the game as a defensive replacement for Tena after his pinch-hit — hit a ball up the middle to plate two runs, the last ones Washington would need for the day. A wild ride, but the Nats ended up taking the game and the series, and are now a game under .500 thanks to the three consecutive victories. Padres earn four-game sweep There were, somehow, even more sweeps than this. The Padres earned the four-game variety, which started out last Thursday against the Rockies with a walk-off grand slam in extras from shortstop Xander Bogaerts, and then on Friday featured another walk-off, a three-run shot from first baseman Gavin Sheets — his second long ball of the day. San Diego didn’t need a walk-off on Saturday or Sunday, as a trio of three-run innings gave them a 9-5 win over Colorado. And Sunday was instead a whole bunch of papercuts, a 7-2 win where San Diego scored in six different innings, the final run a 425-foot dong off the bat of center fielder Jackson Merrill. San Diego is still 1.5 back of the Dodgers in the NL West, but are also the winners of five in a row, so things are at least looking better for them. As for Colorado, well. They are 6-10 now, but hey, they got to .500 for the first time this late in the season in years, at least that clock was reset if nothing else. McGonigle’s first dinger The Tigers were having a rough go of it against Minnesota, but lucky for Detroit they came up against the Marlins. That seemed like a potential problem, given the direction the two were heading in during the early part of the season, but instead, it looks like some balance is being restored to the universe instead. Hey you’re never going to believe this despite the theme of the weekend, but, the Tigers swept the Marlins. Let’s focus on the big detail from the weekend, however. The first MLB homer for top prospect Kevin McGonigle. The Tigers’ shortstop led off the game, and in the bottom of the fifth inning sent a 97.3 mph Sandy Alcantara fastball — the only pitch of the at-bat — 408 feet to center. Even Alcantara can’t leave a ball middle-middle and expect to get away with it all the time. Cubs walk off Pirates The position of the Pirates and Cubs in the NL Central has seemed a little backwards so far in 2026, but Chicago tried to make things right — for them, of course, not Pittsburgh — on Sunday. After dropping the first two of the series to the Bucs, the Cubs looked like they might be getting swept —  you know, like so many other teams over the weekend. What else are you supposed to think when second baseman Brandon Lowe hits a grand slam to put the Pirates up 5-0 in the second inning? Lowe then hit another dinger later on, to make it 6-2, undoing at least a little bit of the offense that the Cubs had managed in between. That would be all the offense that Pittsburgh would manage, however. The Cubs started scoring unanswered runs in the bottom of the fifth — third baseman and free-agent acquisition Alex Bregman drove in a run on a sac fly there and another on an infield fly in the seventh to make it 6-4, then in the eighth, Michael Busch pinch-hit and tied the game with a single to left. In the ninth, still tied, Jose Urquidy came in from the Pirates’ bullpen. Pinch-hitter Michael Conforto doubled to start the frame, then Bregman singled pinch-runner Scott Kingery to third. The bases would end up loaded when right fielder Seiya Suzuki, back from the IL, walked, and then backstop Carson Kelly took it from there. A better weekend for the Pirates than the Cubs, all things considered, but Pittsburgh blew a chance to take the whole series there. Ohtani leadoff shot Shohei Ohtani hit another leadoff dinger. Here it is: Sometimes, that’s all the description you need to catch up on the weekend that was. Jordan Walker keeps homering It was not a great weekend for the Cardinals, with the Red Sox taking the series against them in St. Louis, but it was a great weekend for Jordan Walker. The Cardinals’ right fielder hit his sixth and seventh homers of the season against the Sox, and leads MLB in the category just a few weeks in. Walker was always projected to have some real power at some point as he got a bit older, stronger and more refined, and we might very well be seeing that happen now with the 6-foot-6, 250-pound outfielder.