The New York Yankees absolutely dominated their rival Boston Red Sox in the AL Wild Card Series.
They were so dominant, in fact, that they set a record for winning a series by a historic margin.
The Game 1 win on Tuesday night was 9-0 — that’s the same score that goes into the books if a team decides to forfeit a game. The Red Sox certainly were on the field, but it didn’t matter much.
Then in Game 2, the Yankees pulled out a 9-2 victory. They had put the game to rest long before it was really over.
Yankees Make History
This was the first time in MLB history that a team had ever won a playoff series with at least 90% of the runs scored in the series, according to OptaStats.
This is how they shared that feat:
The @Yankees are the first team in MLB history to score at least 90% of the runs in a postseason series (min. 20 total runs). pic.twitter.com/ckZNp7MsA3
— OptaSTATS (@OptaSTATS) October 1, 2026
The math in this case works out to be pretty simple.
There were 20 runs scored in the series. A whopping 18 of those were by the Yankees.
And 18 runs out of 20 works out to exactly 90%.
There’s never been that lopsided a ratio in a playoff series ever.
Shorter Series
It is fair to acknowledge that the shorter series made it tough for the Red Sox to ever right the ship. The AL Wild Card Round was just a best-of-three series.
That meant that when the Yankees dominated two games, it was over, and that was that.
Still, that doesn’t necessarily make it easier to score 90% of the runs, especially with the 20-run minimum set for the stat query.
In a longer series, a team could win 5-0 for four games and accomplish a similar feat, but that has never happened before. The Yankees, in the short series, really had to bludgeon the baseball to have a chance at this stat.
Of course, it’s kind of an arbitrary stat and not something specific the Yankees would’ve been chasing. It’s just a good way to analyze how one-sided the series was.
Yankees Took Advantage of Bullpen
Red Sox fans will be lamenting that potentially in both games, manager Chad Tracy pulled starters Payton Tolle and Sonny Gray too early.
The Yankees had only scored one run in each game when those guys were on the mound. They then crushed the ball off of Boston’s bullpen each time.
That does make it interesting to wonder what the Yankees will look like in their upcoming ALDS against the Tampa Bay Rays. Do they have better luck against the strong starters of the Rays? Or do they need to push into the bullpen and find ways to score runs in the latter half of games?
There’s almost no chance the Yanks will have this much one-sided success against the Rays, so it’ll turn into more of a scratch-and-claw kind of series.
It had to feel good, though, for the Yankees to dispatch of their rival Red Sox in such overpowering fashion.
Yankees Dominated Red Sox in Unprecedented Way