On the morning of Aug. 23, if you sat down with your coffee and took a look at the wild-card standings, a number of adjectives might have flooded your mind.
Strange. Weird. Wacky. Lackluster. Close. Nutty. Packed. Clustered. For me, there were two: inevitable and shameful.
On that morning, there were just four teams with winning records in the American League. Three of them were in the AL East (Tampa Bay Rays, New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox), and the other was the AL Central-leading Chicago White Sox. This wasn’t an early-season fluke -- at that time there were only 35 days left in the regular season.
A quick refresher: The current MLB playoff format requires six teams per league. If the season had ended that day, we would have a sub-.500 wild-card team in the AL playoffs as the AL West winner. That’s when the word “shameful” entered my mind.
But “inevitable” quickly followed, because when MLB decided to pair a 12-team playoff bracket with the expansion of interleague play, this kind of outcome became inevitable. It remains to be seen if it will happen this year, but this format means there will be losing teams in the MLB playoffs at some point.
How did we get here -- and what can we do about it?
How we got here
This all started back in 1969, when MLB first subdivided its league structure into divisions. Before that, it was literally impossible to have a playoff team without a winning record because there was no interleague play. If you have all teams in a league playing only each other, the closest you could get to this kind of scenario would be for the whole league to tie with a .500 record. But tiebreaker games would push someone into winning territory.
The possibility of a sub-.500 team getting into the playoffs during the four-division era that ran from 1969 to 1993 was likewise remote but not impossible. The 1973 Mets came the closest, winning the National League East at 82-79. The Mets grabbed sole possession of first place and reached .500 on the same day that season, Sept. 21, with only a fraction of the season remaining.
There have been two or three sub-.500 playoff teams, all coming in seasons that required an ad hoc format change because of an external intervention. The “or” in there is because of the 1981 Kansas City Royals, who went 50-53 overall during that strike-shortened season but did go 30-23 to claim the AL West’s second-half crown in the one-off, split-season format.
The other two teams were products of the improvised, pandemic-shortened 2020 season, in which the playoff field was expanded to 16 teams. Both leagues fell one team short of enough .500 clubs to fill out the bracket, and so the Houston Astros and Milwaukee Brewers, both finishing 29-31, played on.
The expansion to six divisions and the introduction of wild cards into the playoff pool back in the mid-1990s increased the likelihood of a losing postseason club. Indeed, in the very first season of the six-division era, only the 1994 strike likely spared us of a sub-.500 division champion in the AL West, which featured the worst four teams, by record, in the league. When the strike hit, the Texas Rangers led the division at 52-62.
Mercifully, the subsequent years proved that kind of scenario to be a fluke, a possibility given the format but still unlikely. Both leagues have had at least six winning teams in each season of the 30-team era, a 28-year streak that is in jeopardy of being snapped this year. There have been close calls because of how the winning teams were distributed within their leagues. The 2005 San Diego Padres won the NL West at 82-80, and the 2006 champion St. Louis Cardinals won 83 games. Whew!
While the specter of a sub-.500 playoff loomed larger with the expansion to a 12-team format for the 2022 season, the odds of it happening exploded with the changes to the scheduling formula that went into effect a year later. The new docket increased the percentage of interleague games for each team from around 12.3% to 28.4 %. Now, if you had one league with a lopsided edge over the other in any given season, the end result might well be the 2026 standings.
The NL has been a much stronger circuit in 2026, for whatever reason. The senior circuit is on pace to win more than 53% of interleague matchups, and because there are so many more of those games now, that’s a lot of extra wins going to the NL side. Run differentials in interleague contests underscore this year’s disparity.
There are eight AL teams with at least a break-even record based on intraleague play but just five have winning marks against the NL, and no AL team is more than five games above .500 in interleague play. Meanwhile, five NL clubs are at least nine games over break-even against the AL.
Given how many teams are clustered around the .500 barrier in the AL, the daily standings will ebb and flow. Some days will reflect a losing team in playoff position, others won’t. If a couple of teams get hot, we might yet be spared a losing playoff squad, but the odds that we end up on the wrong side of that are uncomfortably high.
According to my most recent run of 10,000 simulations, here is how it shook out:
Chances of ...
One sub-.500 AL playoff team: 26.1%
Two sub-.500 AL playoff teams: 1.2%
Any sub-.500 NL playoff team: 0
Sub-.500 pennant winner: 2.3%
Sub-.500 World Series champion: 0.8%
This is not good.
What we can do about it
Right now, this is not an issue at the forefront of the current dialogue between MLB owners and the MLB Players Association, but eventually it’s something that could be addressed when the considerable economic disagreements between the two sides are ironed out.
There are surely some people who don’t care, and that’s fine. It’s a matter of opinion and taste. For others, having a losing team (or teams) in the playoffs would be a further assault on the sanctity of the regular season -- the six-month marathon that is at the heart of what sets baseball apart from the other sports.
This is something that needs to be fixed, if only to amplify the incentives of teams to build a winning roster, and be willing to improve it during the season. I’d begin with an overriding, ironclad rule:
A .500 record is the minimum winning percentage a team must achieve to qualify for the postseason.
When the current format can’t be filled out because of that rule, we have to figure something else out.
Here are six suggestions. I’d guess the odds against any of these being implemented are long. Still, let’s plant some hypothetical seeds.
Option 1: Drop playoff slots that would be filled by a losing team
You have just five teams reach the .500 mark in a league? Fine. You get five playoff spots. The team that otherwise would have played a seed held by a losing team advances to the next round.
In a vacuum, this is my favorite option. It’s simple and clean. It also adds a measure of drama as teams jostling for playoff spots are battling not just each other but also that qualifying standard of .500. It preserves the lines between the leagues, such as they are. It gives a bye to the team playing the 6-seed, assuming they are only short one team. That team would be the No. 3 seed, the third division champion that in the current format doesn’t get enough of a reward.
The problem with this idea is pretty obvious: MLB has broadcast contracts to carry a certain stock of playoff games, and not playing those games would be something of an issue.
Option 2: Draft from another division or league
If you win a division with a losing record, congratulations. That division title flag is your only reward -- because your division doesn’t get a playoff slot.
Most seasons, you would be able to simply take a winning team from another division to fill the spot, one that otherwise would be on the outside.
But what if there weren’t enough winning teams to do that? What if we didn’t have enough winning teams to give us a full set of non-losing wild-card teams? Then we have to look at the other league, which presumably would have demonstrated a clear-enough edge in interleague play to create this problem in the first place.
During the 30-team era so far, there has been just one instance in which a league did not have at least six winning teams. That was the AL in 2017, when leagues still only needed five teams to fill out a bracket. If we had needed a sixth team that year, we would have had one of three teams finishing 80-82 -- the Royals, Rays and Los Angeles Angels. That doesn’t help.
Over in the NL that season, seven clubs won at least 83 games, the worst of which was St. Louis at 83-79. So we simply slide St. Louis over to the AL for that season’s playoff.
This season, that would mean the playoff chances of the Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks, currently battling for the NL’s 6-seed, would go up dramatically. Meanwhile, new life would be breathed into the chances of the Cardinals, Miami Marlins and Pittsburgh Pirates.
The more teams from which you have to choose, the lesser the chance you have to choose one with a losing record, mitigating the unintended consequences of the interleague-heavy schedule. During the 30-team era, there have been at least 12 non-losing teams every season, and the average has been 15.5.
Is this perfect? It would mean, for example, that the Cardinals and Chicago Cubs could meet in the World Series. As a baseball history nut and something of a traditionalist, I wouldn’t love that. But I would hate it less than having a 79-83 team in the World Series.
Besides, we’ve had to get used to a persistent blurring of the lines between the leagues over the past three decades. This would just be another step along those lines. We’ve seen the 1982 AL champion Brewers become a fixture in the NL playoffs and a division rival of the Cardinals, the team they played in that long-ago Fall Classic. We’ve seen the Astros win pennants in both leagues.
The league distinctions are going to continue to erode. For me, that’s what underscores the change in scheduling formula. It’s a frog-boiling situation. When baseball expands, it’s likely that the leagues as we’ve known them are only going to be further scrambled. Allowing a team to switch leagues to fill out an otherwise lackluster playoff bracket is just another step in that direction.
Option 3: Vastly increase the difficulty of the road for sub-.500 teams
This wouldn’t ban losing teams per se, but it would greatly add to their incentive for getting to .500 before their playoff journey begins.
Use ghost wins -- i.e., the losing team has to spot its opponent a win at the start of the series. Don’t give losing teams any home playoff games, even if they survive the wild-card round. The ghost win follows them through each round of the postseason they reach.
While this wouldn’t erase enough of the chances for a losing team to make the playoffs for my taste, it would at least minimize the chances of it getting to the World Series. Better than nothing.
Option 4: Use only intraleague records to determine playoff slots
This is a thing that exists in American sports, so I’ll throw it out there even though I don’t like it. Just as the SEC, for example, crowns its football champion based on conference games only, so would the AL and NL decide their playoff brackets only on intraleague games.
This would be reflected in the standings, so maybe you could overlook an overall losing record because it’s the league record that matters.
Option 5: Kill the leagues and divisions
You have a 30-team scrum and a schedule that is all about jostling for postseason seeding. This isn’t what baseball has ever been, and I’m personally not a fan, but it is simple and clears up any hand-wringing about superior teams ending up in a subservient playoff position because of the format.
Option 6: Fix the schedule
You could use any of the first four options above in conjunction with this. Put the interleague schedule back the way it was or even reduce it from that. Increase the number of games between teams battling for the same playoff spots. Increase the number of games between league and division foes down the stretch. No more last-week interleague games. I am very much in favor of doing this.
Ideas to avoid a season like this, and its possible consequences, can get pretty weird pretty fast. But you don’t have to get wacky, weird or even nutty to get there. You just have to avoid being shameful.
