The AL Wild Card Game unfolded as expected, and that’s perfectly fine

No matter who you were rooting for, the Athletics or the Yankees, you should be a little thankful that New York won the AL Wild Card Game Wednesday night. Even A’s fans, who are once again swallowing the bitter pill of losing a sudden-death elimination game (their eighth in a row) thanks to all the same failings, should be a tiny bit relieved that the 100-win Yankees advanced to the ALDS against the Red Sox.

Because, if they had lost, it would have ignited a Wild Card Game-centric media cycle that would be more annoying than the price of having the Yankees still in the postseason (granted, your annoyance about this may vary).

While a system involving re-seeding teams pre-Wild Card Games looks to be a better method of kicking off the playoffs — where the A’s would have been playing the 91-win Indians instead of the Yankees having to play an extra playoff game — New York losing would have kicked off that conversation in earnest. Their presence in the game at all is already enough to have begun the (correct) murmurings that a team that good shouldn’t have been forced to play their way into a Division Series at all.

It would have been annoying to grapple with that argument right now, rather than in the offseason. It’s much smarter to push that alteration to the offseason — which is probably what’s in our future — than it would be to start that news cycle right now. The Yankees did it, they made it through, and there won’t be a recalculation of the system juuuust yet. We can all focus on the teams still in action.

So it’s easy to be happy today that the AL Wild Card game went exactly as you probably expected it would. Down to the exact way the winner won and the loser lost. It still managed to be exciting, and provide suspense for a bit, but it wrapped up as anticipated.

From the beginning you could sense it. Aaron Judge’s two-run shot against A’s opener Liam Hendriks felt like just as much of a dagger of a home run as Giancarlo Stanton’s 443 foot dinger would be seven innings later. In the middle innings of the game, Judge would connect on a looping hit down the first base line that swooped hard to the right on a bounce and turned a possible routine out into a double.

It was a mix of strength and lucky breaks, bending but not breaking for the Yankees all night. Luis Severino redeeming himself from 2017 with a seven-strikeout no-hitter through four innings, despite allowing four walks and letting the A’s get a foot in the door that they wouldn’t be able to capitalize on. In Aaron Boone’s first postseason game as manager it looked like he might have blown things by not taking Severino out after the fourth, as the ace put the first two batters on. However, Dellin Betances came in and put down three in a row — the start of two innings of work that wouldn’t see a batter touch a base against him.

For the A’s, it was the same as usual too. But instead of the normal offense and defensive prowess they got used to in the second half of the regular season, they — unsurprisingly, dishearteningly — came apart at the seams in all the usual ways. Ways that are more associated with the postseason A’s than might be fair.

Getting runners in scoring position, then squandering every one of those chances. Making beautiful plays that come too little, too late. This time that was Matt Olson wrangling an off-target throw and sliding over first base like a ballerino. Khris Davis crushing a home run after Oakland’s pitching had already let the lead get too far out of hand to come back from. Putting Fernando Rodney in the game in the hopes that somehow, maybe this time it wouldn’t be a performance that could mockingly be placed under the “Fernando Rodney Experience” umbrella and then watching as that’s exactly what it ended up being. And watching him walk off the field looking like someone just ran over his dog.

For every impossible, leaping jump from Hechavarria, there was Stephen Piscotty barely missing out on robbing Luke Voit of a triple at the wall. For every first postseason home run of Giancarlo Stanton’s career, there was A’s batters chasing pitches outside and failing to string together the hits they did have.

But there should be solace even for people who hoped and wished the A’s could pull off the upset here and save everyone from a week of Red Sox-Yankees coverage, and for those who dreamed this game would see the A’s live up to their regular season potential by pulling off the upset over the Evil Empire instead of squandering their momentum. Even for that percentage of the population, there can be some comfort that the Yankees were pretty much always going to win this game, exactly how they won it, and get a spot in an ALDS exactly as they always should have. And we don’t have to argue about any of it right this very second.