The Yankees and Red Sox are headed back into October, with the 2026 American League Wild Card Series giving the old rivals another winner-take-all stage. New York sent Boston home in this round a year ago, but the matchup carries the weight of more than one recent series. These clubs have spent more than a century leaving dents in each other’s history, from pennant races and bloody uniforms to disputed calls, dugout-clearing fights and one unforgettable ball hit over the Green Monster.
Key takeaways
- New York eliminated Boston with a 4-0 victory in Game 3 of the 2025 AL Wild Card Series.
- Rookie right-hander Cam Schlittler struck out 12 Red Sox hitters over eight scoreless, walk-free innings in that clincher.
- Bucky Dent’s three-run homer at Fenway Park decided the 1978 AL East tiebreaker.
- Boston’s 2004 comeback from a 3-0 ALCS deficit began with Dave Roberts stealing second against Mariano Rivera.
- The rivalry’s roots changed baseball when Babe Ruth was sold from Boston to New York in December 1919.
October returns to familiar ground
The 2026 Wild Card Series arrives one season after the Yankees claimed a particularly satisfying October result. On Oct. 2, 2025, Schlittler, a 24-year-old right-hander from Walpole, Massachusetts, made his postseason debut against Boston and overpowered the Red Sox for eight innings. His fastball reached triple digits, he fanned 12, and he did not issue a walk. The strikeout total established a Yankees rookie record for a first postseason outing.
New York’s 4-0 Game 3 win ended Boston’s season and marked the first time the Yankees had finished off the Red Sox in the playoffs since Aaron Boone’s home run sent New York to the 2003 World Series. Boston had won the intervening three postseason meetings: the 2004 ALCS, the 2018 ALDS and the 2021 Wild Card Game. Schlittler’s performance also came exactly 47 years after Dent changed the course of the 1978 division race.
Dent was hardly a feared power hitter, which made his moment all the sharper. The Yankees and Red Sox finished the 1978 regular season tied atop the AL East and met at Fenway Park for a one-game playoff. Boston led 2-0 when the seventh inning began. Dent then drove a three-run shot over the Green Monster, putting New York in front for good in a 5-4 win. In the Bronx, it became legend. In Boston, the name still lands differently.
Boone supplied a similarly permanent image 25 years later. The 2003 ALCS reached Game 7 at Yankee Stadium, and New York erased a three-run deficit against Pedro Martinez in the eighth to pull even at 5-5. In the bottom of the 11th, Boone opened the inning against Tim Wakefield and drove the first pitch down the left-field line for a walk-off homer. The Yankees were headed to the World Series.
That 2003 series had already boiled over two nights earlier at Fenway. Roger Clemens threw inside to Manny Ramirez in Game 3, setting off a string of confrontations. Pedro Martinez grabbed Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer, then 72, when Zimmer charged toward him and sent him to the ground. A later bullpen clash led to assault and battery charges against Yankees pitchers Jeff Nelson and Karim Garcia and a Fenway groundskeeper. Amid all that, New York took a 4-3 decision and moved ahead 2-1 in the series.
A rivalry built on comebacks, collisions and great pitching
Boston turned the tables in unforgettable fashion the following October. Down three games to none in the 2004 ALCS, the Red Sox were three outs from elimination in Game 4, trailing 4-3 against Rivera in the ninth. Kevin Millar led off with a walk, and Roberts entered as a pinch-runner. Roberts stole second just ahead of the throw, then scored on Bill Mueller’s single to tie the game. David Ortiz later ended the 12-inning affair with a home run to right, giving Boston its first win and beginning the comeback.
Ortiz would become inseparable from Red Sox October baseball, and that Game 4 blast was a foundational part of the story. Boston won the next three games, became the first club to climb out of a 3-0 postseason hole, then won the World Series and ended the long championship drought known as the Curse of the Bambino.
Game 6 of that ALCS produced another lasting image. Curt Schilling took the mound with an injured right ankle that had required a procedure to stabilize the tendon before the game. Blood seeped through his sock as he worked seven innings and permitted one run, helping Boston force Game 7. Schilling’s postseason record stood at 11-2 with a 2.23 ERA in 19 playoff starts, and he had shared World Series MVP honors with Arizona in 2001. But his bloody sock in a Boston uniform remains his signature rivalry picture.
The same Game 6 also brought one of the strangest plays between the clubs. With Derek Jeter at first and New York cutting Boston’s lead to two in the eighth, Alex Rodriguez hit a slow roller near the first-base line. Boston pitcher Bronson Arroyo picked it up, and Rodriguez knocked the ball from Arroyo’s glove. Jeter crossed the plate and Rodriguez reached second, but after Terry Francona asked for a review of the play, umpires ruled Rodriguez out for interference. Fans threw objects onto the Yankee Stadium field, but the Yankees’ rally was stopped.
That was far from the first Rodriguez-Arroyo confrontation in 2004. On July 24 at Fenway Park, Arroyo hit Rodriguez on the left arm. Rodriguez exchanged words as he headed toward first, and catcher Jason Varitek joined the discussion. The two players shoved each other, benches and bullpens emptied, and one of the rivalry’s defining photographs was born. Mueller then gave Boston a walk-off win with a home run against Rivera.
Jeter had his own July 2004 classic. With the score tied at 3 in the 12th inning and a Red Sox runner at third, Jeter chased Trot Nixon’s foul fly at Yankee Stadium and launched himself headfirst into the seats. He emerged with the ball, a bloodied chin and the out. Manny Ramirez hit a 13th-inning homer for Boston, but the Yankees answered with two in their half to walk off their rivals.
Some of the rivalry’s best theater has unfolded without either team reaching October. On Sept. 18, 1993, Boston was one out from a 3-1 win at Yankee Stadium when Greg Harris hit Mike Gallego with a pitch. Mike Stanley then appeared to fly out to left to end it, but a child ran onto the field and time was called before the play could stand. Given another chance, Stanley singled. Wade Boggs delivered a two-strike RBI single, Dion James walked, and Don Mattingly drove a two-run single through the right side for a stunning New York victory.
Mattingly had been part of a different Boston-New York debate in 1986, when Boggs sat out Boston’s final four regular-season games because of a torn right hamstring. Boggs finished five batting-average points ahead of Mattingly to claim the batting title, his third in four years and the second of what became four straight. Mattingly finished second to Roger Clemens in the AL MVP vote, leaving Yankees fans to wonder whether a batting crown might have changed the award. Boggs returned for Game 1 of the ALCS.
Pitching brilliance has also cut through the noise. Mike Mussina came within one strike of a perfect game against Boston on Sept. 2, 2001. He retired the first 26 Red Sox hitters and had Carl Everett down to two strikes with two outs in the ninth before Everett lined a single to left. The Yankees completed a Fenway sweep anyway, growing their division lead from six games to nine.
Pedro Martinez authored a masterpiece in the Bronx on Sept. 10, 1999. During a season in which he went 23-4 with a 2.07 ERA and 313 strikeouts, Martinez held the Yankees to one hit and struck out 17 in a complete game. Chili Davis’ second-inning solo homer was New York’s only hit, while Chuck Knoblauch’s first-inning hit by pitch accounted for the only other baserunner. Yankees starter David Cone, himself only two months removed from a perfect game, called it the finest pitching performance he had witnessed. Martinez’s game score of 98 ranks second among Red Sox pitchers since 1908, behind Hideo Nomo’s 99 in his May 25, 2001 one-hitter against Toronto.
The bitterness has occasionally become physical in more damaging ways. On May 20, 1976, a collision between Yankees outfielder Lou Piniella and Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk sparked a broad brawl. Boston left-hander Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who had drawn Yankees attention with comments made in 1973, was hit in the back of the head by Mickey Rivers and then tackled by Graig Nettles. Lee suffered a separated shoulder. The three-time 17-game winner was never quite the same pitcher and was traded to Montreal in December 1978.
All of it traces back to the transaction that gave the rivalry its deepest scar. On Dec. 26, 1919, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees for $100,000. Ruth hit 659 of his 714 career home runs in New York, including 54 in his first Yankees season, helped the club win four World Series titles and became one of the sport’s towering figures. Boston did not win another World Series for more than 80 years.
That history is why another Yankees-Red Sox postseason series never feels like just a few games on a schedule. The 2026 Wild Card round will have its own starters, its own late innings and its own box scores. It will also arrive with Dent, Roberts, Boone, Schilling, Martinez, Jeter, Ortiz and Ruth still somewhere in the ballpark.
