Last Night In Baseball: Watch Out For The Surging, MLB-Best… Marlins?

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 last night in Major League Baseball:

The Marlins crushed the Rockies on Tuesday, 14-3, earning Miami its 20th win of June on the month’s final day. That is not only the most of any team in MLB in June, but also is just the second instance in Marlins’ history where they won at least 20 games in a single month. With the Braves losing to the Cardinals, 5-3, Miami is now just 4.5 back of Atlanta in the NL East: on June 7, the Marlins were 14 behind the Braves. On May 31, they were eight games under .500.

Now, Miami is 46-40, and just capped a month in which it outscored opponents by 53 runs, scoring 133 while allowing just 80: just three teams in the National League have a run differential for the entire season that bests that +53 mark, and only one in the AL managed as much.

Left fielder Griffin Conine — who went 4-for-5 on the day — led off the scoring with an RBI double in the first. The third inning is where business would pick up, though, when shortstop Javier Sonoja hit a three-run homer, his third dinger of the year, to put Miami up 5-1.

That ended up being the game-winning hit, but no one knew it at the time. The Marlins would add another three runs in the sixth on a series of singles, and then in the seventh catcher Joe Mack drove in Sonoja with a two-run jack.

This was overkill at this point, but the longest long ball of the game came off the bat of Owen Caissie: the right fielder drove this 90.4-mph inside-and-low fastball 453 feet to right-center, with it coming off the bat at over 109 mph. Smoked.

It wasn’t just the hitting that starred, though: starter Eury Pérez went 5 ⅓ innings with just two hits and a run allowed, while striking out eight Rockies against four walks. Remember, this game was played at Coors Field — that’s a pretty good turn in the rotation right there.

The Marlins were highly successful in June, and they were also facing legitimate competition. In order: they swept the Nationals, won a series against the Rays, swept the Diamondbacks, took a series from the Pirates, swept the Giants, won series against the Rangers and Cardinals, and have already guaranteed that they would at least do that much against the Rockies. The only series that the Marlins lost all month was to the Phillies, who also spent June surging up the standings. The Rockies are the only team Miami played all month that lacks postseason aspirations, and the Marlins acquitted themselves against that competition quite well.

Speaking of the Diamondbacks, Arizona won 8-2 against the Giants last night, powered in part by Ketel Marte. The leadoff hitter and second baseman went 2-for-5 with three RBIs and a run, with the first two RBIs coming on a single to left in the bottom of the third.

The last RBI might have counted for less, but it was much louder. Marte hit his 17th homer of the year in the bottom of the sixth, drilling a middle-middle curveball 431 feet to right off of Adrian Houser.

It marked the fourth-straight game in which Marte has homered: in a season where his average and walks are both down a bit, the pop is still very much there. And really, the rest of the package has been there since mid-May, as well: Marte is batting .315/.373/.611 with 11 doubles and homers each since May 20, a 37-game stretch.

The D-backs are just 2.5 back of a wild-card spot in the NL, while this loss shoved San Francisco back to 35-50 and 10.5 behind.

The Giants did have something noteworthy happen in their favor during the game, at least. In the top of the seventh, first baseman Rafael Devers crushed a 94.2-mph cutter left over the middle of the plate, and sent it 424 feet to left-center at over 111 mph.

It was career homer No. 250 for Devers, who also drew a pair of walks during the game. He’s now batting .261/.336/.563 with 19 doubles, a triple and 13 of his 15 homers in 52 games since May 3; reports of his demise seem premature, which is good news for the Giants whether they decide to hang on to the slugger or deal him before the trade deadline next month.

Devers, 29, is in his 10th season in the majors, and has played in nine years’ worth of games. He’s averaged 33 homers per 162 games at this point, and if April’s struggles were a temporary thing and not a warning of a steep decline that’s soon to come, he should keep piling on home runs even while playing in that enormous park in San Francisco half the time.

Four games in a row with a home run is great, there’s no attempt to take away from what Ketel Marte has pulled off. However, four games in a row? Not five. And five is where Rays’ third baseman Junior Caminero is right now, as he went yard again. 

In a 10-4 Tampa Bay victory, Caminero made his presence felt with a 2-for-5 showing that included three RBIs and a run. All of those ribbies came on the dinger in the third, one Caminero sent an impressive 438 feet to left-center on a mid-90s four-seamer that caught way too much of the top of the zone.

Fittingly, Caminero was the first player to announce that he’ll be competing in the 2026 Home Run Derby. Looks like he’s got a little bit of a head start on that front.

Caminero is now up to .294/.384/.555 with 23 dingers, with the 22-year-old’s long ball last night putting a bow on a torrid June in which he slugged .673.

On Monday, Tigers’ manager A.J. Hinch became just the second active manager with at least 1,000 career wins. On Tuesday, he and Reds’ skipper Terry Francona were joined by Dave Roberts when the Dodgers downed the Athletics, 9-3. On top of being the third active manager to 1K, Roberts is also the fastest manager to ever reach 1,000 career wins. And this despite his first — and only — game managed outside of his time with the Dodgers being a loss, too.

In 10 full seasons with the Dodgers, Roberts has finished in first nine times and second once. He has a record of 1,000-605, good for a .623 winning percentage, which is just goofy — no wonder he’s the fastest to 1,000 wins, with a track record where the worst season featured 106 wins, and the only time Los Angeles didn’t win at least 91 times was 2020, when the pandemic-shortened season featured just 60 total.

Roberts and the Dodgers got there with help from third baseman Tommy Edman, who blasted a three-run homer in the third inning to make it 5-1, Los Angeles.

And on the mound was lefty Justin Wrobleski, who continued his excellent campaign with an 11-strikeout performance, a new career-best. Wrobleski picked up his 10th win while walking no one while allowing three runs and seven hits over seven innings of work.

The A’s fell to 40-46 with the L, and have lost four in a row, dropping them to 3.5 back of a wild-card spot in the AL. A tough end to a month that had been promising not all that long ago, but there’s also a lot of 2026 left.

The top of the third was not kind to the Orioles. Starter Trey Gibson got wrecked there, with the White Sox managing to score seven runs before an out was recorded. DH Andrew Benintendi led things off with a single, and then shortstop Colson Montgomery hit his 21st homer of the year — a 440-foot blast — to make it 3-1, Chicago. 

Right fielder Braden Montgomery and second baseman Chase Meidroth would both walk, then center fielder Tristan Peters singled to load the bases. First baseman Jacob Gonzalez would plate two with a single of his own, and then came the final blow, with Junior Perez getting his second dinger of the year, a three-run shot, to make it 8-1, White Sox.

Gibson would recover from that long enough to record consecutive outs, ending the streak, but he then walked Benintendi in his second plate appearance of the inning, and that was it for his outing. There was no major comeback for the Orioles in the works, either: Baltimore would lose, 9-3, with Chicago’s bats going mostly quiet the rest of the way but not until way too much damage had already been done. With the Guardians losing — more on that shortly — the White Sox are now two games up in the AL Central, while the O’s have lost four-straight games and five back of a wild-card spot and 12.5 behind the Rays in the AL East.

Yordan Alvarez hit the seventh grand slam of his career on Tuesday, helping the Astros to a 6-4 win over the Twins. It put them ahead for good, as Houston was down 3-2 at the time, but Alvarez cleared ‘em all with a swing of the bat against starter Joe Ryan.

It was his 26th homer of the season, but more notable is that seven grand slams tied the franchise mark for the Astros, also held by Carlos Lee, Alex Bregman and current teammate Jose Altuve. This is also Alvarez’s third grand slam of the season, tying the Astros’ mark for the most in a single season — that is also held by Altuve and Bregman, as well as George Springer, per MLB.

Alvarez is leading the American League in homers and runs (59), and the majors in on-base percentage (.428), slugging (.618), OPS (1.046), OPS+ (189), and total bases (191). Unsurprisingly given all of that, he’s also leading the bigs with 13 intentional walks.

Poor Cooper Ingle. The Guardians’ rookie was making just his second big-league start in the outfield after he was called up last week, and he lost track of how many outs there were. Not only that, but he lost count with a runner on second, and threw the ball into the stands for a fan as if the inning was over.

Right fielder Ezequiel Duran hustled home when he realized there was a miscount, but was awarded the run, anyway, since the ball had been thrown out of play — it counts as a “throwing error” in the boxscore, which, yes, that’s true.

The good news — silver lining edition — is that the Rangers would win this game 4-2, not by a single run, and that the additional run didn’t come until an inning later and not as a direct continuation of this miscue.

On the Rangers’ side that didn’t involve some luck, there was starter Jacob deGrom. The veteran right-hander went seven strong innings with nine strikeouts against zero walks, and gave up two runs on four hits. Tanner Bibbee was nearly as good, but not quite, and the Guards dropped in the AL Central standings while Texas kept its pace ahead of the Mariners and Astros with the W.

The Yankees ended their June with six-straight losses, and while they are still comfortably five games up on a wild-card spot in what’s been a mostly uninspiring American League, New York also fell another game back of the Rays with the latest L, dropping to 2.5 behind.

The problem here was… everything. The Yankees scored just three runs and had four hits, which is part of a larger alarming run: since scoring 12 and 10 runs in back-to-back games, New York has scored five runs once in 13 games, four runs three times, and three or fewer in the rest. That’s an average of 2.5 runs per game, and sure, the endpoints are arbitrary, but it’s another example of what can go wrong whenever historically great hitter Aaron Judge isn’t there to pick up the slack.

A much larger problem on Tuesday, though, was the starting pitching. The normally reliable Cam Schlittler had his second poor start in a row and third of June, as he allowed six runs on four homers in just four innings of work. His ERA for the season is still 2.08, but it’s worth pointing out that his previous appearance had four unearned runs and yet it still climbed from 1.50 at May’s end to this. 

There’s no reason to panic yet — Schlittler is great — but if he’s sliding back towards “great” instead of “elite” then the Yankees need their injured reinforcements to come back whole even sooner.

Meanwhile, Tarik Skubal looked a lot like he’s supposed to for the Tigers, going six innings with nine strikeouts, no walks, and one hit — a solo homer. He gave up two runs, one unearned, before his night ended, which is the kind of performance the ace needed to have with trade rumors swirling. Hey, the Tigers might be just 6.5 back of a wild-card spot, but Skubal is a free agent this offseason and there are nine teams in front of them, and just the Angels and Royals behind.

Bryce Harper used to be a catcher, and then he was an outfielder, and now he’s a first baseman who sometimes is penciled in as a designated hitter. He can still field out there, though, even if he’s not as young as he used to be.

The Phillies blanked the Pirates, 8-0, with starter Cristopher Sánchez lowering his ERA to 2.00 with nine strikeouts and seven scoreless innings, and Harper had an RBI single and a walk to go with the nifty glovework.