There is one week of baseball left to be played, and the future of the AL East—and a first-round bye—hangs in the balance. In an unexpected turn of events, the division is still somewhat open to a battle following the Toronto Blue Jays’ recent four-game skid, and the New York Yankees could realistically pull off the old smash and grab at the eleventh hour.
Entering play on Monday, the Yankees have an 88-68 record to their, and eyeing their first AL East crown in a decade, the Blue Jays lead the division
at 90-66. Given that the Jays hold the head-to-head tiebreaker, the Yankees are, by all accounts, three games back, and they have six opportunities to chip away. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in math to realize that the numbers aren’t in the Yankees’ favor at this point, and FanGraphs presently only indicates a 13.7-percent chance. They’re roughly the same odds as an MLB pitcher getting a hit in 2015, but here’s the thing: that still happened on occasion! (Hello, aging A.J. Burnett.) Although it shouldn’t be expected, it wouldn’t be stunning.
Before assessing the different scenarios in which the Yankees could make some noise here, let’s look at the most important part, the remaining schedule for these two teams. Note that all six are home games for each club.
- Yankees: three vs. White Sox (58-98) / three vs. Orioles (73-83)
- Blue Jays: three vs. Red Sox (85-71) / three vs. Rays (76-80)
The Dream Scenario (6-0)
The easiest way forward is often to do it yourself. While the Yankees need a hand from Toronto’s opponents no matter what, they can make this whole thing a lot smoother if they manage to sweep two of the worst teams in the American League. Assuming New York did that, it’d put the screws on the Jays and force them to win a minimum of four games in their two series, and not just split their way into the AL East crown.
What stands out about the schedule for these two teams is that the Jays face far superior competition, particularly in hosting the Red Sox.
For Boston, any and every win is immensely valuable, fighting tooth and nail for one of those three Wild Card spots. At the moment, they sit just a game ahead of Cleveland and Houston, who with strong finales could both conceivably leapfrog the Red Sox and keep them on the outside looking in come October. Boston does holds both tiebreakers, but if the Guardians pull off their remarkable AL Central comeback to shunt the Tigers down to the Wild Card mix, the pressure would be on the Red Sox to steamroll their final series of the season (against the Tigers) because Detroit swept them earlier in 2025 and is in god shape to own that tiebreaker. Alex Cora’s club has more motivation than just about anyone else in this discussion to take these games in Toronto.
Beyond Boston, the Rays and Orioles look like evenly matched teams, but their Pythagorean win-loss record would suggest otherwise (68-87 for BAL and 82-73 for TB). Even if you take that stat with a grain of salt given that the O’s have played much better in the second half, this gap is too big to overlook. We don’t need to say much about the White Sox on their way to another 100-loss season. If the Yankees see this slim chance of a bye slip away because they lost a home game to the 2025 Chicago White Sox, then it will be utterly deserved.
Possible But Tricky (5-1)
For every game the Yankees fail to win between now and the end of the regular season, their chances of pulling this off drop exponentially. A 5-1 record is a good accomplishment regardless of which opponents you’re facing, and again, the Orioles have played decently enough of late that few neutrals would blink an eye about them taking one game in the Bronx. But if it were to come to this, this possible heist would then require further help from Boston and Tampa — perhaps too much.
You’re either asking one of those two teams (most likely Boston) to sweep Toronto and then the other to steal one of three, or you’re asking Toronto to drop two of three at home in a back-to-back series right at the most inopportune moment. The Jays have gone 50-25 at home in 2025, or exactly two out of three in the other direction. They haven’t been swept at Rogers Centre all year long, and they haven’t lost consecutive home series since mid-May, when they were still considered a .500 team.
Long Shots (4-2 or worse)
In such a case, there are long shots, and there are long shots. The latter is the mathematically real but realistically impossible case in which both the Yankees and Blue Jays play below expectations, but Toronto does it at such a more egregious level that it ultimately costs them the division.
New York could theoretically win the AL East by going 3-3 the rest of the way, but it’d require Toronto to lose out in their own backyard when (as we’ve already touched on) they’ve dominated there all season. If the Yanks win four of the next six, then Toronto is allowed to win exactly once and suffer at least one sweep. They say “You can’t predict baseball, Suzyn,” but it’s not going out on a limb to say that this simply won’t happen.
Layers of impact
This article focuses on the Yankees’ chances of winning the AL East title, but that doesn’t mean all other aspects of their postseason run are signed, sealed, and delivered. In fact, another long-shot scenario could easily turn a nrrow failure to win the AL East into finishing third in the division behind Boston, if New York does a little worse in this final week against Chicago and Baltimore.
Regardless of what the Jays do in their games, the Yankees have ample motivation to properly handle things and keep applying pressure until the end. You’ll definitely want to be hosting that Wild Card round, maximizing the psychological impact of a Yankee Stadium with the instinct of a shark when it smells blood in the water.
