The American League Playoff Race Is Even Sadder Than You Think

The 2026 season is nearing the home stretch, and the race for the final two AL playoff spots is shaping up to be historic for all the wrong reasons.

The Astros are leading the AL West despite entering Friday with a 67–67 record. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

There’s still a month left in the regular season, but we don’t need to wait that long to declare this to be true: the 2026 American League playoff race is the worst in MLB history.

Specifically, the AL West and final wild-card spot form the crux of what’s been a yearlong sojourn to infamy. There are perhaps no five words in the sports lexicon more irrelevant than “If the season ended today.” However, applying that moniker at present would leave us with a .500 division winner (the Astros) and two AL playoff teams with negative run differentials (Houston and the Guardians).

Entering play Friday, the AL West is pacing for a particularly dubious campaign. None of the five teams have winning records, and all have run differentials firmly in the negative. Houston, at minus-44, currently has the “best” mark of the group. Collectively, the five AL West squads have been outscored by their opponents by a staggering 408 runs. Three of them—the A’s (minus-185), Angels (minus-75) and Mariners (minus-57)—rank in the bottom four in the AL in that category.

In all, only five of the 15 American League teams have positive run differentials. If that number holds, it will be the fewest either league has produced for a 162-game season since 1997, when the AL also ended up with just five.

Playoff expansion was always going to lead to subpar teams making the field. But what we’ve seen so far has taken things to a new low. To fully grasp just how unusually incompetent the AL playoff race has been this year, let’s take a look at seasons past to give 2026 the abysmal context it’s earned so far.

AL Central and AL West pacing for poor winners

Miguel Vargas has been the White Sox’ most valuable player this season, and leads the American League with 91 runs scored. | IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect

MLB expanded the postseason field from four to eight teams in 1995, beginning the wild-card era. In the 29 162-game seasons since then, there have been 22 division champions with under 90 wins, or 12.6% of the 174 division winners. There have been four division champs that failed to crack 85 wins (2.3%), most recently in 2008, when the Dodgers won the NL West at 84–78 with a plus-52 run differential.

This year, we’re threatening to add two more to the sub-85 list. In addition to the Astros, the first-place White Sox are on pace to win exactly 85 games, while the fast-charging Guardians are on pace to win 82.

The closest we’ve had to a division champion with a losing record came in 2007, when the Padres won the NL West at 82–80. San Diego did so with a minus-42 run differential—which, incredibly, was the best mark in the division that year by a wide margin.

Just look at the final standings:

Worst division champion ever?

Team	Record	Run differential
Padres	82–80	-42
Diamondbacks	77–85	-160
Giants	75–87	-96
Dodgers	71–91	-70
Rockies	67–95	-122

Twenty-one years later, the AL West is giving that quintet a run for its money. The 2007 NL West squads combined for a .459 winning percentage, finishing 372–438 collectively with a minus-490 run differential. This season’s AL West teams are pacing to finish 365–445 (.451) while getting outscored by 494 runs.

Beyond the AL West, the wild-card race is littered with teams with losing records and negative run differentials. A seven-game winning streak has propelled the Guardians to 68–66 and the third wild-card spot, though they’ve still been outscored by four runs on the year. Last season, Cleveland became just the eighth team to make the playoffs in a 162-game season with a negative run differential (minus-4). Unsurprisingly, three of those eight instances have occurred in the past four seasons (MLB expanded the postseason to 12 teams in 2021).

Playoff teams with negative run differentials

Team	Record	Run Differential
2025 Guardians	88–74	-6
2023 Marlins	84–78	-57
2023 Diamondbacks	84–78	-15
2007 Diamondbacks	90–72	-20
2005 Padres	82–80	-42
1997 Giants	90–72	-9
1987 Twins	85–77	-20
1984 Royals	84–78	-13

Of course, a team that sneaks into the playoffs after a mediocre regular season is not precluded from making a Cinderella run. The 2006 Cardinals won the World Series after going 83–78 with a plus-19 run differential. The ’23 Diamondbacks won the National League pennant, a run that included sweeping the 100-win Dodgers in the NLDS. And the ’08 Dodgers, who won the NL West at 84–78, advanced to the NLCS that season before losing to the eventual World Series-champion Phillies in five games.

This year’s crop of American League contenders looking to crash the field does not inspire much hope. The Rangers were trying to offload their long-term contracts at the trade deadline before eventually doing nothing, while the Orioles traded away former face of the franchise Adley Rutschman along with pending free agent Taylor Ward. The Blue Jays similarly dealt away some key contributors from last year’s World Series run, including Kevin Gausman, Jeff Hoffman and Daulton Varsho (though also acquired Jose Soriano from the Angels). The Mariners, meanwhile, have spent just one day above .500 since the All-Star break, and have not won more than three consecutive games since the start of June.

Rounding things out, the Twins are tied with Seattle at 64–70 and just lost a series to the A’s, while the Tigers have lost 10 of their last 12 yet improbably still own the AL’s third-best run differential at plus-70.

That the AL West could set a new low for division-wide performance yet still put two teams into the postseason says all you need to know about the state of the league.

Perhaps the only year that saw a worse division than this year’s AL West was the 1994 version. At the time of the players’ strike that wound up ending the season prematurely on Aug. 11, the Rangers were somehow in first place at 52–62 with a minus-84 run differential. The entire division—which had only four teams at the time, as the Astros were still in the NL Central—had combined for a .437 winning percentage (199–256) by the time the season was wiped out.

Because of the strike, we were spared from watching a team with a losing record compete in October. This year, it seems the only thing that can spare us from that fate is the thing that’s seemed unattainable all season long: better baseball from the AL’s muddled middle.

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