The New York Yankees have reached Game 162.
The final day of the 2026 MLB regular season is Sunday, but it won’t be the last game for the Yanks. They already know they’ve clinched a spot in the playoffs.
It may not be a totally calm Sunday in the Bronx, though. Inclement weather on the way in is impacting ballgames across the Northeast, and that may also be true at Yankee Stadium.
What Time is the Yankees Game Today?
The Yankees game was moved up two hours on Sunday.
It will now start at 1:05 p.m. ET.
The Yankees already announced that on Saturday afternoon. This was planned based on the weather forecast.
It’s not as drastic a chance as the Boston Red Sox made. They’re playing their final game of the regular season against the Chicago Cubs at Tropicana Field, the home of the Tampa Bay Rays, rather than at Boston’s Fenway Park.
The Yankees and Orioles will do what they can to play the final game. MLB doesn’t like having teams finish with incomplete schedules.
Does Yankees Game Matter Today?
The reality is that the Yankees’ game on Sunday doesn’t matter at all for playoff positioning.
The Yankees can’t move in the standings. They’re in the top AL Wild Card spot and will stay there.
With that comes the 4-seed in the American League. They’ll host the 5-seed Boston Red Sox in a best-of-three Wild Card Series at Yankee Stadium.
The Orioles also can’t move. They entered the week with an outside shot of making the playoffs, but that ended on Thursday.
Now, the only thing Baltimore could potentially do is slightly alter its draft position for the 2027 MLB Draft.
The Orioles do have one obvious thing to play for — Pete Alonso’s league-leading stats. Alonso enters the day leading the American League in both home runs (43) and RBI (113). He has just a one-homer lead on Yordan Alvarez and Junior Caminero (and two ahead of Ben Rice), but he’s eight RBI ahead of Alvarez. It’d be a great feat for Alonso in his first year with Baltimore to lead the AL in those categories.
The Yankees will be looking ahead. Their series with Boston would start Tuesday, and so the Yanks won’t want to use any key pitching arms too long on Sunday that would mess up their potential availability for Tuesday.
Players all over the diamond will also want to add a bit more to their overall season outputs as they head toward whatever might be next.
But as far as the playoff standings go, nothing will change based on the Yankees-Orioles result.
Yankees’ Start Time Change Doesn’t Impact What Matters vs. Orioles