Four weeks from the finish line, the number that matters is four: the Yankees' lead over the Red Sox in the AL wild card race after Sunday night. New York also took the season series between these two, 7 wins to 6, so the tiebreaker is locked in. Boston can still make a run at this. They just made it a lot harder on themselves, and in about as ugly a way as possible.
Austin Wells earned the headline. He opened New York's nine-run eighth inning with a homer off Jovani Moran, then hit a second one in the same inning against infielder Andruw Monasterio, who was on the mound because the Red Sox had run out of better options. Two homers in one inning doesn't happen often; it was the first time a Yankee had done it since Gleyber Torres in September 2022. Needing a position player to close out a 16-1 loss, and having him give up two homers anyway, says something about how this roster is built - something that could matter if New York needs its pitching staff to protect a four-game lead for a month.
Wells wasn't really the story of Sunday, though. Heliot Ramos was. He'd managed only a handful of hits in his first stretch as a Yankee, the kind of quiet, uncomfortable start that makes a front office sweat about a trade before anyone's finished unpacking. Then he hit a three-run homer in the fifth, the swing Boston fans should recognize as the moment the game actually turned, before Wells ever got to the plate. Paul Goldschmidt added a homer of his own, and Jose Caballero, filling in at shortstop for an injured George Lombard Jr., hit a three-run shot off that same Monasterio slider. Four different Yankees hitters looked comfortable against a Boston staff that had nothing left to throw.
Will Warren deserves credit too, credit that gets buried under a box score full of home runs. He went seven-plus innings, allowed six hits, and the only Boston run scored on a Nick Sogard single. When your offense puts up sixteen runs, a start like that can look like an afterthought, but it's exactly what a team trying to hold a wild card lead needs from its rotation in September.
Boston had a legitimate gripe here. Ceddanne Rafaela's glove was ruled to have touched the grass on a play that would have been a catch on Jazz Chisholm Jr.'s liner, and the call stood after a challenge. Argue that it opened the door for everything that followed, and I won't stop you. But a close replay review shouldn't be the difference between a competitive game and a 16-1 final. Somewhere between that call and the ninth inning, Boston's pitching staff stopped getting outs, and no review fixes that.
This was the last time these two play each other in the 2026 regular season, and New York won that argument, taking three of four in the finale series and the season series overall. Boston still has time to close a four-game gap. But they'll do it without the head-to-head tiebreaker, and after watching their pitching staff get treated like batting practice for an inning, they'll do it having just seen exactly what's wrong with the roster they're counting on.
