MLB Monday scores, highlights, updates, news: Rockies' Hoffman pitches gem

Only nine games here on this Monday night, but that still means that 60 percent of the league was in action. That's not bad. Let's take a journey around the league to cover everything worth knowing in MLB on Monday. 

Monday's games

Rockies 8, Phillies 1 (box score)
Yankees 4, Royals 2 (box score)
Reds 5, Indians 1 (box score)
Twins 14, Orioles 7 (box score)
Angels 3, Rays 2 (box score)
Braves 5, Pirates 2 (box score)
Giants 6, Cubs 4 (box score)
Astros 1, Tigers 0 (box score)
Diamondbacks 5, White Sox 1 (box score)

Hoffman with career-best start for Rockies

The Rockies entered Monday night in first place in the NL West and with the second-best record in the NL. They've done so without much help from two of their most talented pitchers, either. Jon Gray has made only three starts and Jeff Hoffman only one. Hoffman is only 24, was the ninth overall pick in the 2014 draft and was the main piece going back to Colorado in the Troy Tulowitzki trade. He was ranked 36th on Baseball America's top 100 prospects list heading into the season.

Through seven career starts, before Monday, Hoffman had shown flashes of his immense upside but hadn't really put it all together.

That changed Monday in Philadelphia. 

Hoffman was brilliant. In seven innings, he allowed only one run on three hits while striking out seven and not walking anyone. He worked in a very good curveball where needed and was never really in any trouble at all. 

Hoffman previously had only one career quality start and that was with three earned runs allowed in six innings; he walked four while striking out three and also coughed up two home runs. His best career start before this one was probably his Oct. 1 outing last season, when he gave up one run in five innings, striking out seven and walking two.

This one was superior and has to give the Rockies confidence. It's not fair to say something like "everything is going right" for them, either. It hasn't. They've had several key injuries and a few slow starts, such as Carlos Gonzalez.

No matter, the Rockies are 29-17 and in first place.

Twins fall behind big and then go nuts

Through two innings in Baltimore on Monday, the Orioles held a 5-0 lead, thanks in part to an Adam Jones three-run home run. It should be noted that Jones set a record here, with his 125th career home run in Oriole Park at Camden Yards. 

 Generally speaking, when a team gets out to a 5-0 lead through two innings, the expectation is that will be a victory. Of course, Ubaldo Jimenez was on the mound and the Orioles bullpen has been pretty leaky so far this season. The Twins would power through, emphasis on the power.

The Twins would score one in the third, one in the fourth -- it was still pretty innocent -- and then four in the fifth and six in the sixth. The Orioles added one along the way, but the 5-0 Orioles lead had been turned on its head and was now 12-6. Miguel Sano would add a two-run homer in the ninth before the Orioles scored a meaningless run in the bottom of the ninth to end in a score that was more suited for a Vikings-Ravens game, 14-7.

Here's the Sano job: 

Every single Twins starter had a hit. Six of them had at least two. Joe Mauer and Max Kepler had three. Jorge Polanco and Sano had four-hit nights. Kepler had four RBI while Sano and Eduardo Escobar had three. Sano and Kepler hit home runs. Brian Dozier, Mauer, Escobar, Polanco and Jason Castro doubled. In all, the Twins collected 21 hits.

This marked the ninth game in which the Orioles blew a lead of three or more runs this season. That is simply unacceptable through only 43 games for a contender.

On the flip-side, the Twins remain one of the better stories of the season. They move to 23-18, which is good for first place in the AL Central.

Houston bullpen comes up huge

A note up front: Brad Peacock started this game, but basically he's still a member of the Astros' bullpen. Ace Dallas Keuchel is on the disabled list and the team is hoping he'll need to miss only one start, so Peacock took the ball in a spot start here.

He would come through huge in a few ways here.

First off, Peacock hadn't thrown more than 39 pitches or gone more than two innings in an outing all year, so he wasn't stretched out. I guess you could call him a long reliever in this day and age due to four two-inning appearances, but that's still not exactly a starter workload. In this game, Peacock would get through 4 1/3 innings with 70 pitches. So not only did he stretch himself much further than he previously had, but Peacock got the game to the point that manager A.J. Hinch didn't have to use anybody outside of his three best relievers in a close game without totally burning anyone else out.

Chris Devenski would follow with a pretty normal Devenski outing: 2 2/3 IP, 0 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 2 K. OK, so maybe he usually strikes more out.

Will Harris and Ken Giles would then combine for two perfect innings with four total strikeouts. 

In all, the Astros' relievers -- remember, Peacock is a reliever -- threw a one-hit shutout.

Dallas Who? 

I kid, but that's a heck of an effort by the aforementioned pitchers, specifically Peacock. 

Panik, Blach prove too high a mountain to climb for Cubs

The Giants took a 6-0 lead into the bottom of the eighth inning. The Cubs then scored four runs and brought the potential tying run to the plate -- none other than Kris Bryant -- before the Giants even recorded an out. So things got pretty dicey. Still, the Giants survived and the heroes would be Joe Panik and Ty Blach.

Panik would lead off the game with a home run. He would add two doubles and end up with two runs and two RBI, not to mention a few very good -- one sparkling -- plays on defense at second base.

The Giants actually hit three home runs in a game for the first time this season, as Brandon Belt and Justin Ruggiano would also go deep. There were somewhat helped by a strong wind blowing out at Wrigley Field and that's the second part of the story ...

... Because the wind was blowing out for both teams and the Cubs have far more power hitters. And yet they had zero runs against Ty Blach through seven innings. He pitched to contact, too; he had only three strikeouts. Blach avoided the big inning by not walking anyone and generally not making mistakes in the zone. Nine of the 21 outs he recorded were grounders, and most of the fly balls were weakly hit (obviously, otherwise they would have ended up in the seats). 

And don't look now, but the Giants have won eight of their past 10 games.

Addendum: The defensive highlight of the night came in this one, thanks to Cubs center fielder Albert Almora:

Yankees rely on the long ball again

The Yankees grabbed the victory on Monday, moving them to 26-16, which is good for the second-best record in the AL. Their four runs came on a solo Brett Gardner homer, a two-run Didi Gregorius shot and a Chris Carter solo job. On that front, here comes our stat of the night: 

Katie later pointed out that the MLB record for a percentage of runs coming via the home run in a season is 53.1 percent by the 2010 Blue Jays.

Let's zero in on Gardner for a quick second, too. The homer on Monday was his ninth of the season. That's a 162-game pace of 35. His career high for a single season is 17 and he had only seven last year in 634 plate appearances. What gives? Well, he's hitting the ball with more authority. Coming into Monday, Gardner's hard-hit percentage on the season was 35.5 after only 25.8 last year. He's putting more than 22 percent of his fly balls into the seats compared to 5.9 percent last year. 

If you're gonna start driving the ball a lot harder into the air, especially as a lefty in that ballpark, good things are gonna happen.

Oh and related: Aaron Judge got his own chambers in Yankee Stadium. 

Quick hits

• Matt Adams hit his first career home run with the Braves. 
• Mets starter Steven Matz will make a rehab start on Tuesday and, if everything goes well, there's a chance he'll then join the Mets for the first time this season, reports David Lennon of Newsday.
• Twins starter Phil Hughes lands on the DL with right biceps tendinitis. 
• The Tigers optioned pitcher Anibal Sanchez to Triple-A. 
• The Angels optioned first baseman C.J. Cron to Triple-A with infielder Nolan Fontana coming up.
• After only four days, the Braves released James Loney. Obviously the Matt Adams trade made a difference here.