Yankees vs Red Sox in the AL Wild Card Series? What the Standings Say With Three Weeks Left
Baseball is three weeks from handing us the matchup it has wanted for a quarter century. As things stand right now, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are lined up to play each other in an AL Wild Card Series starting September 29.
The Yankees hold the top Wild Card spot at 83-62. The Red Sox hold the second at 80-67. Under the current format, the No. 4 seed hosts the No. 5 seed in a best-of-three, all three games at the higher seed’s park. That means three straight nights at Yankee Stadium with the season on the line for both.
If that happens, it will be the loudest baseball played in North America this year.
The bracket is not locked yet, though, and the gap between these two is the reason. Three games separate New York and Boston, and the Yankees already banked the tiebreaker by taking three of four in Boston from August 28-30. If they finish tied, New York gets the higher seed. The Red Sox would have to actually pass the Yankees in the standings to flip home field, which with 15 or so games left is possible but not likely.
The Yankees also have a longer shot they are still chasing. They sit four back of the Rays in the AL East, and Tampa Bay owns that head-to-head 6-3 with four games left in the Bronx from September 22-24. New York would need a sweep of that series plus outside help just to force the issue. Winning the division would mean skipping the Wild Card round entirely, which is the only outcome the Yankees actually want.
Boston’s situation is more comfortable than it looks on paper. The Red Sox are six games clear of Cleveland for the second Wild Card spot, and the Guardians themselves are only one game ahead of Toronto for the final berth. Boston’s cushion is real. The Red Sox have three games left against Cleveland that could matter if things go badly, but they are not the team sweating right now.
The team sweating is everyone below them. The Guardians lead the Blue Jays by one and the Rangers by a game and a half, and they lose head-to-head tiebreakers to both. Toronto beat Cleveland for that tiebreaker last Thursday. Texas holds it too. So the Guardians can finish tied with either team and still go home. That is a bad place to be with three weeks left, and it means Cleveland effectively needs to win outright rather than survive to a tie.
The Twins are 4.5 back and the Orioles are three back. Both are alive, barely, and both have tiebreaker scenarios still unresolved.
Here is the part worth sitting with. Yankees and Red Sox have met in the postseason plenty of times, but the modern Wild Card round is a different animal. Three games. No off days. Whoever loses goes home having won 80-plus games. There is no series-long adjustment, no coming back from an 0-2 hole across a week. One bad start, one bullpen meltdown, and a full season disappears.
New York gets the added subplot of Aaron Judge. He missed 84 games with a rib stress fracture and was activated in early September. Before he went down he had 17 homers and a .908 OPS in 59 games. The Yankees went 45-39 without him, which is fine but not what a team with this payroll wants. If Judge is anywhere close to himself by late September, the Yankees are the more dangerous team in that series.
Boston has the confidence of a team that has hung around all summer without the sport paying much attention. That works fine in September. It works differently in the Bronx in October.
Nothing is decided. But if the standings hold, the sport gets Yankees-Red Sox in a winner-take-all format on September 29, and that is about as good as regular season baseball setting up a postseason can get.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.