A tongue-in-cheek projection sent to me by a colleague a couple of days ago gets to the heart of how the American League standings look so far:
Yankees: 94-68
Rest of AL: 81-81
Angels: 68-94
No, the final standings won’t look like that, and the joke is probably unfair to the Tampa Bay Rays, though their plus-17 run differential portends a finish closer to the AL’s rabble than to the New York Yankees (at plus-75) -- but it’s hard to look at the AL records from top to bottom and not wonder what the heck is going on.
Nearing the quarter mark of the season, two of the AL’s three division leaders are just two games over .500 (the 20-18 Athletics and 21-19 Cleveland Guardians) while the Detroit Tigers and Seattle Mariners are tied for the final wild-card berth at 18-21. In fact, the AL-worst Los Angeles Angels are only three games out of a playoff spot, too.
While six weeks of a baseball season is not nothing, it’s still early, and just from a visual standpoint, the standings look a little more bunched than they would if we were looking at a 162-game version. But even if you extrapolate the current winning percentages out to 162 games, we’d still see 10 of the 15 teams landing in the 68-to-77 win zone, plus a couple more at 83.
What is going on? Are teams really this clustered? Is the league really this ... basic? Let’s dive into it.
Why does this seem so weird?
At current paces, the final standard deviation in wins among AL teams would be 14.4. This is actually not unusual. In fact, things were a lot more bunched from top to bottom in the AL just a year ago (9.7 standard deviation), but it’s still very early in the season and we’re digging into big-picture scenarios from a small sample of results.
The current paces of the Yankees and, especially, the Rays aren’t likely to hold up. That means that 14.4 figure is likely to shrink. How much? We’ll get to that, but -- spoiler alert -- the clustering is likely to get even more extreme.
There are two reasons why it feels so strange and we’ll address the first one here. It seems weird because while the separation isn’t a historical outlier at present, it does represent a reversal of the American League’s dynamic from the end of the last decade.
Let’s flash back to 2019. The narratives flying out of the standings page were about competitive disparity, which seemed especially egregious in the AL. Three teams won more than 100 games, two more won at least 96 and, because the playoff field had not yet reached six teams per league, Cleveland missed the postseason with 93 wins.
Meanwhile, three teams in the AL lost 100 or more, including the 108-loss Baltimore Orioles and the 114-loss Tigers. The standard deviation in wins for the AL was a whopping 19.0, easily the highest of the 30-team era.
But here’s the progression for the AL since then, including a 2026 figure based on current simulations.
Wait, the projected final standard deviation for this year’s AL is 8.8?
Yep. Projections aren’t destiny but that’s the way the numbers flesh out right now, which puts this season on course to be even more extreme than last season.
Aside from the projections, if current win paces were to hold up, the Yankees and Rays would finish with well over 100 victories. That would make this season different from 2025, when the AL win leaders (New York and the Toronto Blue Jays) landed at a fairly tepid 94 wins. Having two powerhouse teams drives up standard deviation. But those paces aren’t likely to hold up.
Didn’t you say that there were two reasons this seems weird?
Yes. The other reason this looks weird is that there are so few teams in the AL with a winning record. In fact, right now, two AL clubs with losing records would make the playoffs.
This second reason is the subject of a few narratives about the competitive landscape that I’ve seen going around right now. These are essentially centered around the question of whether the mighty NL has simply gained a firm upper hand over the meek AL.
The answer to this might be an emphatic “yes!” -- but it’s too early to say for sure because there is still a lot of disparity in the schedules between teams and the leagues. This has little to do with the competitive landscape within the AL, but we’ll make a couple of points about this nonetheless.
Entering the season, my projections had the average AL team winning 81.5 games, leaving 80.5 wins for NL clubs. This suggested a slight top-to-bottom upper hand for the AL, which was the case last year. The NL was more top-heavy and of course has the Los Angeles Dodgers, but the overall talent level in the AL appeared to be a little bit better. My forecasts suggested that it would continue in 2026.
So far, it has not. The NL has a 23-game edge in interleague play, and while that isn’t completely supported by the run differentials (the gap should be around 15 games), it’s still substantial. But this was the case early last season and by the end of the campaign, the AL ended up with a 14-game edge.
We have to wait for the effects of the schedule to play out. So far, the NL has played quite a few more home games in interleague play but this will, by design, even out by the end of the season. Keep your finger off that panic button.
So you’re saying the AL’s mediocrity isn’t going to continue?
Hold on there. That’s not what we’re saying. The conclusion that the NL has raced away from the AL is not just premature, it might well be wrong. But for our purposes, as the schedules even out, the AL should see a little more of a normal dynamic. There isn’t likely to be any sub-.500 division champions or multiple losing-record wild-card teams.
Thus, the “why” of the NL’s early leg up matters, and the answer is probably the early schedule, and nothing more than that. If that’s true, the NL’s edge is not going to hold up -- not to this extent. If the expected progression toward normality fails to take place, then we’ll have a whole other set of questions to pose.
Besides, there is a difference between mediocrity and parity.
OK, then: How much parity does the AL have?
We’ve kind of already laid that out above, so here let’s get into some probabilities. Keep in mind the standard deviation thresholds above, and one more: The lowest standard deviation in AL win totals during the 30-team era is 7.2, set in 2015 when the Kansas City Royals won the World Series in a very flat competitive landscape.
Based on my latest run of simulations, here are the percentage probabilities for different standard deviation outcomes in 2026. The average for the era is 12.9.
There is little chance we’ll end up with a record level of clustering in the AL, at least for this era. There’s an 8 to 9% chance we’ll end up on the extreme low end for the 30-team period, but the most likely outcome -- better than 50-50 -- is that by the end of the season, we’ll look back and think, “There was nothing to see there.”
In the meantime, enjoy it. Because here’s one last observation: Right now, 13 of the 15 AL clubs own at least a 14% chance of making the playoffs, and 11 have a more than 20% shot. Whatever is happening, it’s going to make for a really fun summer for fans of American League teams.
