The AL Wild Card Race Is a Mess: A 75-75 Division Leader Proves the Format Is Broken
The Houston Astros currently lead the American League West at 75-75. Not 75-55. Not a team hanging on through a rough patch. A .500 baseball club is the best of three teams in a division and would host a playoff series.
Meanwhile the Guardians, at 76-74, hold the final AL wild card spot. Two games over .500 in the middle of September, and they are in.
Something is broken, and it is not the teams. It is the format asking mediocre baseball to carry postseason weight.
The chase pack is a traffic jam
Look at who is still alive behind Cleveland per the Sept. 14 standings. Blue Jays 75-75, one back. Rangers 74-76, two back. Orioles 72-78, four back. Twins and Tigers both 70-79, 5.5 back. Mariners 70-80, six back.
Not one of those clubs has a winning record. Seven teams are chasing a playoff berth and every single one of them has lost more games than it has won. A 70-79 team in the second week of September is still checking the wild card standings, and technically it should be.
Compare that to the top of the league. The Rays are 90-59 and have clinched. The Yankees are 86-63 and hold the top wild card by 10.5 games. The Red Sox are 82-68. Those three built real seasons, and their reward is a bracket that lets a 76-win club walk in the same door.
The divisions are the worst part
The AL Central is a coin flip between the White Sox at 76-73 and the Guardians at 76-74, half a game apart. SportsLine gives Chicago a 65.1% chance at the division, Cleveland 34.6%. The winner of that gets a first-round bye as the projected No. 2 seed.
Read that again. A team that may finish with 82 or 83 wins is projected to sit out the wild card round while an 88-win Red Sox club plays a best-of-three to survive. The Astros at 75-75 lead the West with 75.1% division odds over the Rangers at 74-76 and their 21.4%, and if it holds, Houston hosts Cleveland in a wild card series where neither team can claim to have earned home anything.
The projected bracket: Rays and White Sox on byes, Astros against Guardians, Yankees against Red Sox. One of those matchups is a real playoff series. The other is two .500 teams playing for the right to get swept.
The odds board has already priced this in. Caesars as of Sept. 13 listed the Yankees at +750 and Rays at +800 to win the World Series, with the White Sox at +2000 despite a likely bye, and the Guardians at +2500. The market knows a bye does not turn a 76-win team into a contender.
New York, for what it is worth, just got Aaron Judge back from injury, which should make the gap between the top of this league and the bottom of the bracket even more obvious over the final stretch.
I understand the counterargument. More teams alive in September means more cities watching baseball, and that is worth money. But there is a difference between hope and noise, and the AL right now is mostly noise. When a 70-79 team can reasonably plan a playoff run, the standings have stopped communicating anything about quality.
The postseason is supposed to sort out which good team is best. This year the AL bracket is going to spend a round figuring out which average team is least average. That is a format problem, and the only reason nobody is fixing it is that the mess itself sells tickets.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.