Wild card could come down to tiebreaker
Last weekend, while the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole was in the middle of giving up seven runs to Cleveland, pitching coach Matt Blake went out to the mound for a chat with his ace. During the visit, Cole turned and saw the out-of-town scoreboard which showed that both the Blue Jays and Red Sox were winning, and he wasn’t happy.
This weekend, while the Jays are in Minnesota hoping to pick up a few wins against the lowly Twins, Jays fans will be doing plenty of scoreboardwatching themselves, especially with the Red Sox and Yankees facing off at Fenway Park starting Friday night. So will the players.
“Of course they’re gonna look at what’s going on,” Jays manager Charlie Montoyo said before serving a one-game suspension Thursday in Minnesota, adding that he and the coaching staff won’t “and that’s fine with me.”
Pitcher José Berríos, back in the stadium he called home for the first five years of his career, says he’ll be keeping an eye on the Yanks and Sox this weekend.
“You know, every day, every night we pay attention to those games,” Berríos told the Star’s Gregor Chisholm at Target
Field. “But at the same time we’re trying to focus on our game, trying to win the most games we can win out there. And at the end of the day we’re going to be good if we keep winning.”
He’s right, but we’re still going to watch.
The question is: How does a Jays fan figure out who to root for? If you can get past the fact that you might have to cheer for either the Red Sox or Yankees, it’s a good question.
A Boston sweep puts the Jays in a terrific position to win the second wild card, but drastically lessens the Jays’ chances to host that win-or-go-home matchup.
A Yankees sweep tightens things up dramatically and, if the Jays do enough winning in Minnesota, could leave the Red Sox on the outside looking in going into the season’s final week.
The likeliest result, of course, is that one team wins two out of three, and maybe it’s because the Red Sox for all their faults have never inspired the passionate “sports hate” in me that the Yankees have, but I think the best way this weekend at Fenway shakes down for the Jays is if the home side wins as many games as possible.
The Red Sox will finish the regular season on the road with three games each against the Orioles and Nationals, both in last place. The Yankees,
after a three-game set at the Rogers Centre that begins Tuesday, wrap it up at home with three against the Tampa Bay Rays —who will likely have the AL East Division title sewn up, but might still be trying to hold off the Houston Astros for the top seed in the league. The Jays host the Orioles for three games to finish up their regular schedule.
Regardless of what happens this weekend in Boston, the Red Sox are likely to win the first wild card because of their final-week schedule, so it makes sense for Jays fans to hope that the Yankees get kneecapped as much as possible, and come to Toronto next week with the Jays having the opportunity to bury them.
If the Red Sox don’t take care of business this weekend, then get tripped up by the Orioles and/or Nationals while the Jays and Yankees keep things tight, then it’s possible all three teams wind up tied for the two wild-card spots, in which case the tension would get ratcheted up another notch or six.
In the case of a three-way tie, the Jays would go to Boston for a one-game playoff to determine who gets to host the wild-card game. That game would be at Fenway, because the Red Sox won their season series against both the Jays and Yankees. The Jays would get a spot in that game since they’ve already clinched their season series against New York.
While the winner of that one-gamer gets to sit back and cool its heels for a day, the loser has to head to the Bronx for a one-game playoff against the Yanks to see who gets the second wild-card spot.
After the Jays wrap up their regular season in Toronto on Oct. 3, it’s very possible that they could play game 163 in Boston the next day, game 164 in the Bronx on Oct. 5, the wild-card game back in Boston on Oct. 6 and then open an AL Division Series in Tampa Bay or Houston on Oct. 7.
It’s exhausting just thinking about that.
The Jays have never played a 163rd game to determine a playoff spot. The closest they came was in 1987. Had they beaten the Tigers on the last day of that season, they would have played another game the next day, also in Detroit, for the division title (there were no wild cards back then). That didn’t happen because Frank Tanana won an incredible 1-0 pitchers’ duel with Jimmy Key, each lefty throwing a complete game.
Only once have the Jays taken part in a wild-card game. In 2016, Marcus Stroman threw six brilliant innings, then five relievers held the Orioles hitless for five more until Edwin Encarnación walked it off with a three-run homer in the 11th as Zack Britton watched from the bullpen.