Last Night in Baseball: Clayton Kershaw’s Final Start… Ever?

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:

Kershaw makes his final regular season start

Clayton Kershaw already had his final home start in a regular season game, but Sunday was his final regular season appearance — and, depending on how the Dodgers do in the first round of MLB’s postseason, possibly his final-ever appearance, too.

The Dodgers will take on the Reds in the NL Wild Card Series, but Kershaw, as Sunday’s starter, was left off of the roster for this first-round matchup so that Los Angeles could fill the spot with a player who isn’t going to be resting up for days before he can go again, instead. 

Which means that Los Angeles has to advance past the Reds if this isn’t going to be the last that we see of Clayton Kershaw on the mound. But if this was actually, truly the end, and not just his final regular season appearance before he heads off to retirement, then at least he got a moment to savor it, involving his teammates and a game Mariners’ crowd.

Kershaw didn’t look like a pitcher on the way out against Seattle: he struck out 7 batters in 5.1 shutout innings while giving up just 1 walk and 4 hits on 94 pitches. His ERA for the season is just 3.36, which is only high for Clayton Kershaw, whose 2.53 career ERA is, until the moment he actually retires, the best among active players.

Blue Jays win the AL East

Things got out of hand there for a bit, especially when the Yankees completely revived in September, but in the end the Blue Jays became the AL East champions, and the No. 2 seed on the AL’s side of the postseason. Unlike some more passive clinching going on later in the day, Toronto aggressively made this happen for themselves, defeating the Rays 13-4. This Alenjandro Kirk grand slam ended up being all the offense that the Blue Jays needed…

…but then they scored another nine runs in the innings that followed, anyway. Addison Barger and George Springer would add their own dingers later on, in what proved to be a very efficient day for Toronto’s offense. Of their 19 baserunners — 15 hits and four walks — 13 of them ended up coming around to score.

The Jays will take on the winner of the Red Sox-Yankees AL Wild Card Series, as their seeding secured them a first-round bye. 

Guardians clinch with a walk-off HBP

The Guardians would have to wait until Sunday to find out if they were AL Central champions, but on Saturday, they clinched a postseason spot when the Astros fell too far behind to catch up to either Cleveland or the Detroit Tigers. And they did it in the way most befitting a team that was outscored by six runs on the season but managed to put themselves in a position for a postseason trip, anyway: with a walk-off hit by pitch.

Don’t worry, they clinched the AL Central in a slightly more powerful fashion.

This alternate angle that focuses on Brayan Rocchio — and the Guardians’ crowd behind him — is worth your time, too. Watch them as they watch the ball heading toward that foul pole until finally, clank — game and division won.

The Guardians might not be much of a threat offensively, but the pitching is legitimate, and they came back from 15.5 games back to win the division — that’s the furthest back anyone has been. And it wasn’t even a gradual climb back, as the Guardians were 9.5 back of the Tigers as late as Sept. 10. What a whirlwind month for Cleveland, and now they get to bring that pitching staff to a short series against the Tigers, who they have won five of their last six against just this month.

Brewers win franchise-high 97 games

The Brewers ended up losing their first two games against the Reds over the weekend, but on Sunday, they avoided the sweep with a meaningful victory. Sure, they weren’t able to keep their division rival out of the postseason with just the one W in three tries, but Sunday’s win was their 97th of the season, and that’s the most in franchise history.

The 2018 and 2011 Brewers were the previous record holders, with 96 wins, both of which had surpassed the previous tie at the top between the 95-win 1979 and 1982 Milwaukee squads. Now there’s a clear-cut, single club at the top, though, and it’s the 2025 edition, which filled the middle of its season with one of the greatest stretches of this century to leap into first in the NL Central to begin with.

Now, the Brewers are also the NL’s top seed, as the Phillies finished at 96 wins. Both clubs get a first-round bye, with Milwaukee facing the winner of the NL Wild Card Series between the Padres and Cubs, while the Phillies take on whoever comes out of Dodgers-Reds.

Mets fail, Reds back in

The Reds made it to the postseason, securing the NL’s third wild card despite Sunday’s loss to the Brewers. And the team embracing that they were jokingly referred to as cockroaches for their refusal to die is truly fitting, because it’s not as if they had a great September. They went 14-11 and outscored their opponents by just two runs, but at least they did go 8-3 over their last 11 games to pick up that pace a bit and keep the Mets from recovering. New York was just 10-15 in September, and even dropped two of three to Cincinnati at one point. They lost two of their last three series to subpar teams in the Nationals and Marlins, and that ended months of torture and what would have been, at best, slowly backing into the postseason: New York was all of 38-55 from June 13 onward, and played better-than-.500 ball in exactly one month after May. The Reds might have problems, but at least they weren’t the Mets.

New York’s offense scored plenty of runs, but that pitching… well, Deesha Thosar went deep on the team’s problems on Monday, and you should check that out. The team isn’t in the worst place imaginable by any means, not when they have Juan Soto, Francisco Lindor and plenty of promising youngsters who arrived to the majors too-late to save the season, but 2025 is going to sting for a while despite that salve.

Ohtani sets new career, Dodgers’ home run highs

MLB’s final weekend didn’t have all the possible record home runs it could have — Cal Raleigh’s season stopped with 60 and Eugenio Suárez didn’t become a record fifth player with 50 in a single season — but Shohei Ohtani at least gave us something to marvel at. One year after setting the Dodgers’ franchise record for homers with a personal career-best of 54 dingers, Ohtani improved that figure by one with his 55th homer of the year.

With Raleigh getting to 60 and smashing a bunch of catcher- and switch-hitter-related records along the way, the sheer volume of 50-homer players and Aaron Judge having yet another historic season, the quality of Ohtani’s offense might even have come off a little underrated. He hit .282/.392/.622 with 55 home runs, though, with that slugging leading the NL, and his 380 total bases led the majors. Oh, and Ohtani stole 20 bases, picking up his final one on Saturday night, making him the only player in MLB history to ever have a 50-homer, 20-steal season more than once. Ohtani, of course, became the first — and only — 50 homer, 50 steals player a year ago.

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