HOUSTON -- No Texas Rangers team had gone winless on the road more than seven times in a season before the Houston Astros' beat them Wednesday night for their eighth loss in eight games this season at Minute Maid Park.

All that stood between the Rangers going 0-for-2019 was rookie left-hander Kolby Allard, who wasn't even in the organization ...Read more

ATLANTA -- Another player filtered Wednesday afternoon into Gabe Kapler's office, shut the door behind him, and sat down to talk about the season.

The Phillies were three hours from beginning a 4-1 win over the Braves, but Kapler first wanted his players to "open up about their season." Kapler, along with general manager Matt Klentak, is ...Read more

BALTIMORE -- The Orioles have suffered some discouraging losses over the course of this painful season, but it's hard to imagine any of them comparing to the carnage that took place on Wednesday night.

The O's busted out to a six-run lead in the early innings and seemed to stave off a seventh-inning comeback attempt by the Toronto Blue Jays, ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- So much for magic numbers.

With all the attention on the Twins' magic number for clinching the AL Central -- a digit that remained frozen at seven on Wednesday, by the way -- it was easy to forget about Jake Odorizzi's own personal magic number: 16.

As in, 16 outs. If the Twins' righthander records 16 outs, if he pitches 5 1/3 ...Read more

CLEVELAND -- Yasiel Puig hasn't had quite the type of impact he had hoped when he came to Cleveland in the July three-team trade. Though for one night, he knew he had found what he wanted the moment it left the bat, as he lifted the Indians to a 2-1 win in extra innings over the Detroit Tigers.

Tied 1-1, Roberto Perez reached base to lead off ...Read more

MILWAUKEE -- Seth Mejias-Brean, who exactly two weeks earlier made his major league debut at the age of 28, started at shortstop for the Padres on Wednesday night.

"The last 10 or 12 days here, we'll get some guys the opportunity to go out and play and see what they've got," manager Andy Green said a few hours before his team's game against the...Read more

PITTSBURGH -- No rookie has any business hitting that pitch that way that hard.

But the Mariners' Kyle Lewis says he's always had natural opposite-field power, and he showed it off once again Wednesday night.

With an inside-out swing, Lewis hit a 91-mph inside sinker 383 feet over PNC Park's out-of-town scoreboard in right field, his fifth ...Read more

ST. LOUIS -- The Cardinals gained a couple of extra at-bats thanks to a blinding sun in the seventh inning Wednesday, and Matt Wieters made Washington's Max Scherzer pay.

Making his first appearance since Aug. 31, Wieters hit a two-run, pinch-hit home run to give the Cardinals some breathing room in what turned out to be a 5-1 win.

The Cards ...Read more

OAKLAND, Calif. -- In the final month and a half of the season, Royals pitcher Jorge Lopez turned around what had been a frustrating season.

In one three-batter span on Tuesday night, the Oakland Athletics turned upside down what would've been Lopez's most encouraging outing.

Lopez gave up two runs, including a solo home run, in the bottom of ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- They were three pitches in a game that featured 292 of them, delivered by one of 15 hurlers who took the mound on one of those drawn-out, expanded-roster-fueled September evenings in Dodger Stadium.

But that tiny snippet of the Los Angeles Dodgers' 7-5 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays before a crowd of 48,663 Tuesday night, a game...Read more

BOSTON -- Hall of Fame slugger Carl Yastrzemski stood on the grass at Fenway Park on Tuesday afternoon and explained that the San Francisco Giants were causing him to lose sleep.

Carl insisted he watches all of his grandson Mike's games with the San Francisco Giants until the final out and still wakes up at 6:30 every morning.

The grandfather ...Read more

Try answering some of the questions posed in the annual trivia contest held by the Society for American Baseball Research. We're including five questions from each of the four rounds of competition. If we included questions solely from the final round, you'd have no chance. Answers are at the bottom.

Round 1

1) What is the popular term for the...Read more

CHICAGO -- Yu Darvish discovered he had no margin for error Tuesday well before he embarked on one of his record-setting strikeout performances.

Darvish was tagged for three runs in the first inning, which offset his 13 strikeouts in a 4-2 loss to Sonny Gray and the Reds at Wrigley Field that dropped the Cubs into a tie with the Brewers for the...Read more

ST. LOUIS -- The Washington Nationals replaced regular first baseman Ryan Zimmerman with Howie Kendrick, their outstanding utility man Tuesday night at Busch Stadium. After all, Kendrick was 6 for 8 in his career against Cardinals starter Miles Mikolas.

Make that 8 for 11 now.

Kendrick tripled and scored in the second. He hit a solo homer, his...Read more

PITTSBURGH -- As a junior at Gonzaga in 2013, Marco Gonzales went 7-3 with a 2.80 earned-run average on the mound and led the Zags at the plate with a .311 batting average, earning him the John Olerud Award as college baseball's best two-way player.

Which is a long way of saying this: The dude can hit a little.

Gonzales pitched one of his best...Read more