The Houston Astros are AL West champions. They did it by watching the Rangers lose 6-4 to the Twins on the last day of the season.
Houston and Texas were tied. The Astros held the tiebreaker after taking nine of 13 head-to-head meetings. So the division went to the team that finished at .500 or worse, which has never happened in a full 162-game season.
Every Team in the Division Was Bad
This was not one flawed club backing into a title. Every team in the AL West finished with a negative run differential. The Angels lost 100 games for the first time in franchise history. The Athletics and Mariners never mounted a real push. The Rangers spent the year hovering around break-even and got eliminated entirely on the final afternoon.
A division champion is supposed to mean something. This one means Houston was the least bad of five teams that were all bad.
Give Houston Some Credit Anyway
The Astros were 20-31 in mid-May with as many as 16 players on the injured list. Climbing back from that to a division title is a real accomplishment regardless of what the final record says.
Yordan Alvarez hit 42 home runs and carried the lineup through the worst of it. Josh Hader was dominant in the ninth. Peter Lambert broke out. Hunter Brown and Jeremy Peña came back from injury and changed the team.
Houston also fired general manager Dana Brown in August and still got to October. That is the eighth AL West title in ten years and the ninth postseason trip in that span.
The Seeding Is a Joke
Houston gets the No. 3 seed and hosts the No. 6 seed White Sox in the Wild Card Series starting Tuesday. Three wild card teams have better records than the Astros. Those three teams have to play on the road.
This is the format working exactly as designed and producing an outcome nobody would defend on its merits. A team that could not win 82 games gets home-field advantage over clubs that won 90 or more because of which geographic bucket it landed in.
What Happens Next
The winner of Houston and Chicago goes to Cleveland for the Division Series. The Astros have two World Series titles since 2017 and enough October experience to be dangerous in a short series no matter what the regular season looked like.
That is the argument for leaving the system alone. A weak division winner who gets hot in the Wild Card round is still a threat. It is also the argument for changing it, because nobody should be able to buy a postseason bye zone with a .500 season.
The Format Conversation Is Coming
MLB has resisted seeding playoff teams strictly by record because divisions are how the sport organizes itself and how local rivalries get built. That logic held up when division winners were actually good.
A team at .500 or worse hosting a Wild Card Series over clubs with nine or ten more wins is the reductio ad absurdum of the current setup. The league will study it. The league will probably do nothing.
Houston did not break the rules. It followed them to the only place they could lead.
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.