There’s still a month left in the regular season, but the American League playoff picture is already making history for all the wrong reasons.
What stands out first is the AL West, where the whole division has been a mess from top to bottom. Entering play Friday, none of the five teams had a winning record, and every one of them was sitting in the red in run differential.
Houston’s minus-44 was the best of the bunch. Collectively, the division had been outscored by 408 runs, with the A’s at minus-185, the Angels at minus-75 and the Mariners at minus-57 all sitting among the AL’s four worst run differentials.
That ugliness extends beyond one division. Only five of the 15 American League teams have positive run differentials right now, and if that number holds, it would be the fewest either league has produced in a 162-game season since 1997.
The weird part is how this could still sort itself into a playoff bracket. If the season ended today, the Astros would be division winners at .500, and the AL would also send two teams with negative run differentials to the postseason, including the Guardians.
Cleveland is in the third wild-card spot after a seven-game winning streak got them to 68-66, but they’ve still been outscored by four runs overall. Last season, the Guardians became just the eighth team to reach the playoffs in a 162-game season with a negative run differential, and three of those eight cases have come in the past four seasons.
The AL West, though, is on a pace that borders on absurd. As a group, the five teams are tracking toward a 365-445 finish, which would leave them at .451 and minus-494 in run differential.
The closest comparison cited is the 2007 NL West, whose teams finished 372-438 with a minus-490 run differential. That division’s winner, the Padres, got in at 82-80 with a minus-42 mark, which remains the closest thing to a division champ with a losing record.
This year, there’s a real chance the AL adds two more teams to the list of division winners under 85 victories. Houston is on pace for 85 wins exactly, while the White Sox are also on pace to win 85 and the Guardians are tracking toward 82.
The wild-card field does not look any cleaner. The Rangers were trying to move off long-term contracts at the trade deadline before ultimately doing nothing.
The Orioles traded away former face of the franchise Adley Rutschman and pending free agent Taylor Ward. The Blue Jays also shipped out several pieces from last year’s World Series run, including Kevin Gausman, Jeff Hoffman and Daulton Varsho, while also acquiring Jose Soriano from the Angels.
Seattle has been stuck in a bad stretch too, spending just one day above .500 since the All-Star break and not winning more than three straight since the start of June.
Then there are the Twins, tied with the Mariners at 64-70 and coming off a series loss to the A’s, and the Tigers, who have dropped 10 of their last 12 yet still own the AL’s third-best run differential at plus-70.
There is still a path for a mediocre team to make noise once October starts. The 2006 Cardinals won the World Series after finishing 83-78 with a plus-19 run differential.
The 2023 Diamondbacks reached the National League pennant and swept the 100-win Dodgers in the NLDS along the way. The 2008 Dodgers won the NL West at 84-78 and made it to the NLCS.
But the American League’s current crop doesn’t exactly scream surprise run. For now, the clearest takeaway is that the AL West could set a new low for division-wide performance and still put two teams in the postseason. The only thing that would keep this race from getting even uglier is better baseball from the AL’s muddled middle.
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