If a Yankees victory is combined with a Red Sox loss at Washington, the Yankees will play the winner of the second wild card at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night.
If the Yankees beat the Rays on Sunday, they are guaranteed one of the two wild-card positions. The Yankees needed two wins to secure a playoff spot for a fifth straight year and home-field advantage in the wild-card game. In a familiar script for a team that has chased all of its successes with failures, the Yankees put together an impressive 5-1 road trip and vaulted into first place in the wild-card standings, but could not close the deal in their final three-game series, at home. Now, they face the possibility of getting tangled up in a madcap, four-way tie for the two American League wild cards, which would need to be unraveled on Monday. But after an embarrassing loss to the Tampa Bay Rays on Saturday put the team back in a precarious position, the idea of playing one more game isn’t necessarily a good thing, not yet.Īs recently as Friday afternoon the Yankees seemed poised to host a wild-card game on Tuesday. There was a time this summer, as the season teetered on the edge of bitter disappointment, that those words might have elicited great excitement for Yankees fans. The Yankees will play further into October after Sunday.
