The New York Yankees face the Boston Red Sox in the AL Wild Card game on Tuesday, October 5, 2021 (10/5/21) at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts.
Fans can watch the game for free via a trial of fuboTV.
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The winner of the one-game playoff advances to the ALDS, where they will face the Tampa Bay Rays in a four-game series. The loser is eliminated from the playoffs and their season is over.
Here’s what you need to know:
What: AL Wild Card Game
Who: Yankees vs. Red Sox
When: Tuesday, October 5, 2021
Where: Fenway Park
Time: 8 p.m. ET
TV: ESPN
Channel finder: Verizon Fios, Comcast Xfinity, Spectrum/Charter, Optimum/Altice, Cox, DIRECTV, Dish, Hulu, fuboTV, Sling.
Live stream: fuboTV (free trial)
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Baseball’s regular season closed with a flourish — the New York Yankees and Boston both won in their last at-bat to wrap up playoff spots.
And for a while, it looked like there might be even more excitement than that.
The final day began with four teams still in the mix for the American League’s two wild cards — all of them within a game of each other — and the top two teams in baseball fighting it out for the NL West title. For all the talk about postseason expansion, the current format held up pretty well this year, if the idea is to create compelling, close races at the end of the season.
Consider what this year’s standings would have produced if baseball had a 14-team postseason with four wild cards per league. In the AL, seventh-place Seattle finished four games ahead of eighth-place Oakland. No race to the finish there, and the fight for the No. 1 seed (and a first-round bye) would have gone comfortably to Tampa Bay.
In the NL, the Giants and Dodgers would have battled to the end for the top seed, the same way they did for the division title. Seventh-place Philadelphia finished three games ahead of a sub-.500 San Diego team.
What makes the conversation about postseason expansion tricky is that it’s hard to find consensus on what the goal of the playoff format should be. Is it to reward the best teams? Is it to keep more teams in the race? Is it to create an exciting finish to the regular season for neutral fans?
The 106-win Dodgers, who finished a game behind San Francisco in the NL West, now have to face St. Louis in a single-elimination situation. Meanwhile, 88-win Atlanta goes straight to the Division Series. Maybe that seems unfair, but the current playoff format made the NL West race matter and forced both the Dodgers and Giants to keep playing important games all the way to the end.
Those are the types of tradeoffs that need to be considered.
(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)