Last Night In Baseball: Blake Snell Returned To The Dodgers And Dominated

A long-awaited return. A four-way tie for MLB's home run lead. The AL's best extends its winning streak. Tuesday's MLB action provided all that and much more.

Here are all the best moments from last night in Major League Baseball:

Before Tuesday, Blake Snell had pitched in just one game in 2026. He didn’t debut until May 9 due to shoulder soreness, and lasted just three innings while allowing four runs before exiting and then ending up right back on the IL to recover from elbow surgery to remove loose bodies. Last night, though, he looked plenty recovered: Snell struck out the side in the first inning…

…and then whiffed another seven Royals over the next five innings. Snell allowed just four baserunners and one run — that’s the kind of pitching the Dodgers signed the two-time Cy Young winner for in the first place.

Shortstop Mookie Betts had a big day on the other side of the ball. He hit his 14th homer of the year in the second inning, and picked up another two hits, including a game-tying single in the eighth.

Betts went 3-for-4 with a homer, double and single, two runs and two RBIs, and Los Angeles needed that performance since reliever Evan Phillips allowed three runs while recording just one out. The game headed to extras thanks to Betts, and there third baseman Max Muncy singled in Shohei Ohtani for the walk-off win.

The Dodgers added Tarik Skubal at the trade deadline because the rotation needed an assist — especially with Ohtani restricted to hitting indefinitely due to his knee — but getting Snell back will be just as huge. The two have the same number of Cy Youngs, after all.

Luis Rengifo signed with the Brewers as a free agent this offseason, but things did not go well: he hit just .205/.280/.254 for Milwaukee in 57 games before he was cut loose on June 23. The Padres picked Rengifo up less than a week later, and he’s been great — on the Brewers’ dime — in the time since. He’s batting .321/.415/.457 for San Diego, and hit his third homer of the season and third with the Padres on Tuesday… against Milwaukee.

To make things that much worse, it was a grand slam in the bottom of the second to make it a 5-0 game.

The scoring would not stop there for San Diego, as right fielder Fernando Tatis Jr. bashed his fourth homer in seven games — his 12th of the season — to make it 6-1.

The Padres would end up winning 11-2, getting their run differential for the season back to zero, and got there on the strength of Walker Buehler’s performance, too. Since getting crushed in a three-start stretch in early July that saw Buehler allow 20 runs and six homers in just 11 innings, the right-hander has strung together a five-start run with a 3.20 ERA. If Buehler can still hack it in the rotation, and the Padres get what they expect out of deadline acquisitions Robbie Ray and Casey Mize, then they might manage to actually escape negative territory in the long run.

This was a huge win for the Padres in the present, too, as San Diego won its fourth-straight game on the same night that the Phillies and Diamondbacks lost, putting it in a three-way tie for two wild-card spots.

Speaking of the D-backs. The Rockies were down 2-0 to Arizona through five, but then Kyle Karros happened.

The third baseman tied the game with his 10th homer of the year, a 413-foot shot to left-center, and then one inning later in the seventh DH Mickey Moniak broke the tie with a sac fly. That ended up being the game winner, as a trio of Rockies’ relievers threw scoreless innings to shut down the D-backs from there. 

One of those was closer Jordan Romano, whom the Rockies picked up in May after the Angels discarded him. Romano has struggled with the long ball for years — his ERA from 2024 through 2025 was 7.83 thanks to giving up 14 homers in 56 ⅓ innings, and he posted a 10.13 ERA in eight innings for the Angels this spring. With the Rockies, whose home games are played in MLB’s most offense-heavy stadium, he has seven saves and a 3.38 ERA in 11 games. Go figure.

The Yankees and Mariners opened up a series on Tuesday, and things did not go Seattle’s way. The M’s should have known things weren’t going to work out when this bounce went George Lombard Jr.’s way.

Right into the shortstop’s hand! In the seventh, with New York down 1-0, third baseman Ryan McMahon drove in a pair to give the Yankees the lead.

Center fielder Trent Grisham would then add another two runs, scoring McMahon and another, to make it 4-1. The Mariners didn’t have an answer for any of those, and would lose 4-1.

This was a waste of a good start from Bryan Woo, who went five scoreless with just three hits allowed, five strikeouts and a walk allowed. The bullpen did well, save Michael Rucker, who was charged with all four runs and recorded just one out before he was lifted.

Seattle has now lost five in a row, and finds itself 4.5 back in what still looks like a very winnable AL West, and is four games behind in the AL wild-card race. The Mariners are also behind every team still in that race, with only the Royals, Athletics and Angels behind them in the overall AL standings — that’s not where you want to be.

The Yankees won, yes, so that means their fans can surely laugh about this happening to second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr.

Like the challenge never happened, really.

Matt Olson has been on one lately. In the bottom of the eighth against the Mets on Tuesday, the Braves’ first baseman crushed a middle-low slider from Chayce McDermott 423 feet to right. That was his 35th homer of the year, putting him in a four-way tie for the MLB lead.

Olson has bashed seven homers in his last 11 games, slugging .902 in that stretch, and is now batting .266/.343/.554 on the season: that’s his highest slugging percentage and OPS+ with Atlanta since his 2023, in which he finished fourth in the NL MVP race and led the majors with 54 long balls.

The Braves would win, 4-0, keeping pace with the Dodgers for the second-best record in the NL — that particular distinction matters, since the top two division winners get a bye past the Wild Card Series, and the Brewers are ahead of both of these clubs at the moment. 

Speaking of records: just one team in the American League has crossed the 70-win threshold. In the NL, each of the three division leaders have already gotten there, and now its top wild-card team, the Cubs, has managed the feat as well. 

Chicago had a slugfest with the Nationals on Tuesday, an 8-6 victory for the Cubs that saw both teams club three dingers. Pete Crow-Armstrong’s wasn’t the first, nor was it the game-winner, but it went far.

The ninth pitch of the at-bat was left way up in the zone, and PCA crushed it 437 feet to right, with the ball flying off his bat at 111.5 mph. That was his 27th of the year, and now he’s just three dingers from a 30 home run, 30 steals season. On top of the NL-leading .933 OPS and MLB-best 7.5 wins above replacement.

You know who else is tied for the MLB lead in homers? Rays’ third baseman Junior Caminero. A sweeper up in the zone became a 412-foot blast, and put Tampa Bay up 2-0 in the first inning.

Caminero is tied with not just Matt Olson, but Astros’ slugger Yordan Alvarez and Phillies’ DH Kyle Schwarber, as well. The Rays would score another seven runs, but they didn’t need quite that many: Nick Martinez threw a complete game while allowing four to the A’s to improve his own record to 12-3.

The other notable performance in the Rays’ eighth win in a row? That would be No. 9 hitter and shortstop Taylor Walls, who snapped his homerless streak that dated 105 games back to last July, with a 387 footer in the fourth as a left-handed batter. Then, batting from the other side of the plate in the sixth, the switch-hitter hit another home run.

No homers for over a calendar year, and then two in one game, from different sides of the plate. It’s also inexplicably the second time that Walls, who has just 24 homers in his six-year career, has done deep twice in one game from different sides of the plate. And he’s the first-ever Rays player to pull it off, as well. Baseball!

The Cardinals defeated the Phillies 2-0 on Tuesday, and this catch in center from Everson Pereira certainly played a role in that. You can hear the thud when he slams into the wall, such was the force of it, but he managed to hold on, anyway.

This W was bad news for the Phillies, who as mentioned are now in a three-way tie for just two wild-card spots, but good news for St. Louis: it picked up a game on both the D-backs and Phils with the victory, and are just 3.5 back of those tied clubs.

The Red Sox fell to the Blue Jays on Tuesday, their fourth-straight defeat after an unreal stretch that saw them win 27 of 30 to vault not just into wild-card contention, but into possession of one of them in the AL. There’s no lesson to be learned from any of that, it’s just how baseball goes sometimes over a long season, but maybe there is a lesson in this throw from Wilyer Abreu. Like, say, don’t run on him. 

What a laser, and with a perfectly placed and timed bounce at the end. Boston still has a 4.5 game lead over the third wild-card team, the Rangers — who also lost on Tuesday — but all of that is great news for Toronto. The Jays are now 2.5 behind Texas, and picked up a game in the standings on the Twins and Guardians last night, as well.