Last Night In Baseball: Mike Trout Celebrates Anniversary And Return With Dinger

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: Mike Trout debuted in the majors on July 8, 2011. Mike Trout came back from a stint on the IL for a strained right hamstring on July 8, 2026. He marked both occasions the same way: by hitting a 438-foot homer. This shot in the eighth inning put the Angels up 11-0 on the Rangers, and seriously, Trout crushed it. Lefty reliever Robby Ahlstrom left an 88.4 mph changeup over the plate and knee-high, and Trout shot it back in the other direction — and pulled to left-center — 22 mph faster than it arrived. Trout is freakishly strong. It rules. For the night, the Angels’ DH was 1-for-4 with a walk, two runs and two RBIs, courtesy that homer. A much better night than July 8, 15 years ago, as Trout was 0-for-3 in his debut. Just 19 years old at the time, Trout batted all of .220/.281/.390 with five homers in 40 games in 2011. The next season, he won the American League Rookie of the Year and finished second in the MVP vote, too, while leading the majors in wins above replacement, so. It didn’t take very long for Mike Trout to become Mike Trout, you know? Time flies in a number of ways. Speaking of flies, check out what Jo Adell was up to in the same game. The Angels’ right fielder went yard twice, first with a two-run dinger in the fourth to give Los Angeles a 3-0 lead over Texas… …and then again on a hard-hit liner that StatCast estimated at 433 feet, if it hadn’t hit that pesky solid wall behind the fence. Adell golfed that one, too — that was the kind of pitch so low that it probably needed an ABS challenge to be called a strike, and he drove it away at 110 mph. The Angels would end up winning, 13-1. Which, about that… The Rangers were getting crushed, thanks to a combination of starter MacKenzie Gore giving up seven runs in five innings and his opposition, Walbert Ureña, getting away with walking five batters in four innings without so much as allowing a run. Texas’ bullpen gave up another four runs after Gore exited, while the Angels’ pen kept the shutout going — in the bottom of the eighth, Kyle Higashioka stepped to the plate as a pinch-hitter to lead off, down 11-0. The result? Elation. Pandemonium. A run. The fireworks! The Tarps Off crew in the stands losing it like Texas had just tied the game up or this was the World Series! Incredible vibes, really, and good for those fans to still be able to have a good time with the deficit cut to 10 runs and just six outs remaining. Higashioka was not so lucky in the ninth. The Rangers put him on the mound, and he gave up two runs, meaning he left Texas with a larger deficit than he entered into before his homer. And yet! No shutout. Small victories, you know? Kyle Schwarber entered play on Wednesday leading the majors in dingers. The Phillies’ All-Star mashed number 31 on Tuesday, and the next day bashed the sequel. Not his longest long ball ever, but boy that one still got out of the park in a hurry. Schwarber hit a career-high 56 homers in 2025, his first campaign reaching 50, and is now on pace for 57 for 2026. This is a good time to point out that just 11 players have ever hit 50 homers more than once in their careers, and just seven of those managed the feat in back-to-back seasons. Somehow “Schwarber went deep again and is on pace to make history” wasn’t the homer-centric story of this game, however. And that’s because his dinger cut the lead to 11-4, Reds, on account of Cincinnati having already hit five homers of its own in the game. Including a back… …to-back… …to-back stretch in the bottom of the fourth. Shortstop Elly De La Cruz hit a two-run homer to put the Reds up 5-2, off of lefty Tanner Banks, off an 88 mph slider on the outer part of the zone. Four pitches later, Banks caught way too much of the middle of the plate against third baseman Sal Stewart, who went yard for the second time that day, but first time off Banks. And last, Banks gave up the second to-back of back-to-back-to-back two pitches later on a slider low in the zone, to left fielder J.J. Bleday. Maybe the wildest bit about this is that Bleday’s was the third homer in the row but the fourth of the inning: Banks had entered the game shortly after right fielder Noelvi Marte hit his sixth homer of the year, off starter Alan Rangel. The homers stopped after Bleday’s, at least, but the damage was already done: Cincinnati was up 7-2 at that point, and while four more runs were scored, they weren’t necessary for the W. The Padres and Diamondbacks are both fighting for a wild-card spot in the NL, which makes series like the one they are facing off in right now important in the lead-up to the trade deadline and also just in general: after Wednesday, five teams are sitting within 5.5 games of the final wild-card, and it’s San Diego and Arizona at the back of that line. The D-backs were ahead of the Padres in that race, but San Diego has now won the middle two games of the series, and the fourth will determine if this is a split or an extremely productive start to the week for the Friars. On Wednesday, San Diego started scoring in the third, and didn’t stop again until the eighth: one run in the third and another in the fourth, then two, then four and another two. Shortstop Xander Bogaerts was responsible for the two in the fifth, with a two-run single to left that made it 4-1, Padres… …and then the sixth brought the four-run inning, with catcher Luis Campusano hitting his fourth home run of the year… …third baseman Sung-Mun Song singling in another run, followed by right fielder Fernando Tatis Jr. singling to left and then advancing to second as a run scored. Center fielder Jackson Merrill would make it four runs with a single of his own before Arizona got out of the inning, but the damage was done. The Padres would add two more to get to double-digits, and win 10-4. The Dodgers quickly recovered from losing to the Rockies on Tuesday, with it being Los Angeles getting the late-game rally this time around. The game was tied 3-3 after the Rockies scored a run in the top of the third, and stayed that way until the bottom of the eighth, thanks to Dodgers’ starter Roki Sasaki and Rockies’ starter Gabriel Hughes both buckling down from that point forward, to each toss a few scoreless innings and come out of this with Quality Starts. Colorado’s bullpen blinked first and last, though, when shortstop Mookie Betts picked up his lone hit of the day on a hard-hit single to center that scored the game-winning run. Betts was batting fourth, and “lone hit of the day” wasn’t meant to say he did little: Betts went 1-for-3 with a walk, a run and an RBI. He’s also in that cleanup spot because he’s looked an awful lot like Mookie Betts [complimentary] again of late: over his last 22 games and 97 plate appearances, he’s hitting .322/.371/.556 with 11 extra-base hits and a .927 OPS. The Guardians nearly pulled it off. After hitting a couple of early homers to go up 3-0, Cleveland ended up letting the Twins tie things up in the fourth with a three-run inning. After that, both sides went quiet at the plate until the seventh, when right fielder Chase DeLauter picked up one of his two hits of the day to make it 4-3, Guardians. Shortstop Brayan Rocchio would drive in another on what was meant to be a sac bunt but ended up being a throwing error with everyone safe. The problem is that the Twins once again responded immediately: in the bottom of the seventh, two walks with the bases loaded — both from lefty Erik Sabrowski — made it a tied game once more. That setup Minnesota in the bottom of the ninth to win with a walk-off hit, and it did: right fielder Alan Roden picked up his second hit and second RBI of the day courtesy of a deep 393-foot single that was only a single because that was the ballgame. Not an ideal result for Cleveland, given it’s fighting for a wild-card spot and missed an opportunity to tie with the also-losing White Sox atop the AL Central. For Minnesota, the W has it just two games back of Chicago and a game back of the Twins for the second wild-card spot, half-a-game behind any wild-card in general. Listen, the less said about Tuesday’s hugely embarrassing loss in which the Royals scored 12 unanswered runs and beat the Mets by four runs, the better. So let’s focus on Wednesday’s game, where it was New York doing the rallying with a big inning instead! In the bottom of the eighth, the sequel to a 16-12 game was tied up 1-1. Alex Lange entered in relief, and at first things went well — he got left fielder Juan Soto and third baseman Bo Bichette out. That’s when things began to fall apart, though: shortstop Francisco Lindor singled, then right fielder and rookie Carson Benge drew a walk to put the go-ahead run on second with two down. DH Jorge Polanco singled to load the bases, and then Lange hit first baseman Jared Young with a pitch — 2-1, Mets. Second baseman Brett Baty then hit a two-run single off Lange, who was then replaced by Jose Cuas. He threw a wild pitch to score Young, then catcher Francisco Alvarez singled in Baty — 6-1, Mets. That was — count ‘em — five two-run outs. Somehow it was just five, too: Cuas then gave up a double to center fielder A.J. Ewing, but it didn’t score Alvarez, and then Soto was intentionally walked as the Mets batted around because yeah, he’s literally Juan Soto. Bichette ended up striking out swinging to end the threat, but it didn’t matter — Xzavion Curry only gave up one run in the bottom of the ninth, and it was the Mets’ dub. What is the series finale going to bring us, anyway? Here is a selection of home runs from Wednesday’s Orioles-Cubs tilt in Baltimore. Coby Mayo, who entered the game as a pinch-hitter, hit a second-deck home run, just the eighth such shot at Camden since the park opened back in 1992. Cubs’ center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong went yard not once, but twice. That homer was Crow-Armstrong’s 20th of the year, making him a 20 homer, 20 steals player for the second year in a row and the first since a mid-90s Sammy Sosa, per MLB Stats. And, as mentioned, he had a second dinger, too. And then there were Michael Conforto and Carson Kelly going yard on back-to-back pitches, not just at-bats. The Cubs would win, 9-7, in a game that had these five homers plus another four more. That’s right! Nine dingers in one game. You would have thought that maybe more than 16 runs would have been scored, but the homers kept coming too regularly for anyone to be on base for a bunch of them. Oh, and it was nearly 10 homers. Check out this catch by Taylor Ward in left. Close! But maybe it should have been further. As the last entry reminds, almost doesn’t count, but “almost a no-hitter” is still worth noting, too. And that’s what Dylan Cease managed for the Blue Jays on Wednesday, when he entered the ninth inning with a no-hitter going against the Giants. He failed to record an out in the ninth, however: left fielder Heliot Ramos led off the inning and picked up his — and the Giants’ — lone knock of the day with a liner to center, and that was it for Cease. What a day, though: one hit over eight innings accompanied by 11 strikeouts and three walks. Tyler Rogers cleaned things up after Cease’s departure, and Toronto would win, 10-0.