One Good, One Bad: Game 1 (Wild Card)

By Andrew Hefner

September 30, 2026

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I am so excited to be back for a third season of “One Good, One Bad” for the 2026 postseason, and almost three years after I wrote my final article of the season in the car on the way home from watching the Dodgers win in our stadium, I can confidently say that a lot has changed.

The Yankees took care of business this time around, opening the postseason at home with a dominant 9-0 win over the Boston Red Sox in game one.

After the beatdown, let's take a look at one good and one bad from the opener of the 2026 American League Wild Card Series.

The Good

There is so much to talk about, from Cam Schlittler delivering one of the Yankees' best postseason pitching performances in decades (even after he did almost the same thing a year ago) to Ben Rice mashing the Yankees to victory. With so much good, I wanted to take this one a bit more broadly.

The Baby Bombers, in some new form, have returned to the postseason. In 2018, I was 9 years old, and awed by the next generation of Yankees poised to be the stars of tomorrow and (in theory) capable of bringing a championship back to New York. Tyler Wade (congrats on retirement), Clint Frazier, Gary Sanchez, Aaron Judge, and more were the new era of New York Baseball. Today, only one remains. The slack needed to be picked up, and luckily enough, the young guns in George Lombard Jr., Spencer Jones, Ben Rice, and Austin Wells made themselves a valuable piece of the puzzle last night.

Postseason experience is at a premium among that group, yet the quartet combined for ten hits and eight RBIs in the blowout. With Aaron Judge out, and Giancarlo Stanton just barely nursing himself back to health in time for the series, this year’s postseason relies more on this group than any other. The offensive production was not there for the latter half of the year, but these four, along with Anthony Volpe, proved that they were capable of being here for the biggest moments and stepping up when it mattered most. They did that last night.

The Bad

In writing these articles across three seasons, I have never really had to think as hard about “The Bad” of a game as I have had to for this one. The Yankees offense was on fire, Schlittler was immaculate, the bullpen held up perfectly, and the game management was outstanding. I could criticize 3-for-11 with runners in scoring position, but nine runs were still scored. I could say that Goldschmidt’s 0-for-3 performance at leadoff left much to be desired, but that was an experiment that did not have an effect on the outcome of the game.

I think the only bad thing to truly extract from the game as a whole would just be the Yankees’ overreliance on modern matchups. Heliot Ramos is not the man for right field in Yankees stadium, nor is he the three-hole hitter in the biggest game of the season. Yet a lefty pitcher on the mound “calls” for him to be in the starting lineup. The bench runs deep this postseason, and there is room for experimentation, but at some point the better hitter overall needs to be in the lineup. It worked last night, but I just do not see the practice being sustainable across a postseason where consistent at-bats are needed, and the better defensive or offensive players overall are not being played.

First pitch is tonight at 8:00 on NBC with Max Fried taking the mound against the Red Sox’s Sonny Gray.