The Houston Astros won the American League West on Sunday at 81-81. No team had ever won a division in a 162-game season without a winning record.
How Houston got in
They did not clinch it themselves, at least not first. The Rangers lost 6-4 to the Twins, which handed Houston the division. The Astros then beat the Athletics 9-0 in their own game 162.
The result is a first. Houston finished exactly at .500, and no division winner in a full 162-game season had ever failed to finish above it. The Astros also set a new low for wins by a playoff team in a 162-game season, breaking the old mark of 82, held by the 1973 Mets and the 2005 Padres.
The Phillies held on
We wrote Sunday that Philadelphia was one game up with Arizona holding the tiebreaker, which meant they had to finish ahead outright rather than tie.
They did. The Phillies beat the Rays 7-3 to take the third National League wild card and the No. 6 seed. It is their fifth straight postseason.
Arizona is out, extending its playoff drought to three seasons.
The field
Ten teams clinched over the preceding week: the Rays, Brewers, Dodgers, Yankees, Braves, Red Sox, Cubs, White Sox, Guardians and Padres. Houston and Philadelphia completed it on the last day.
The story of the field is still Chicago. The White Sox reached October after consecutive 100-loss seasons, which had never been done, and the Cubs went with them. Both Chicago clubs in the same postseason has happened four times.
The BeezLoop Take
A division winner that did not manage a winning record is going to start an argument about whether the format is broken, and the argument is worth having honestly rather than reflexively.
The case that it is fine: divisions are geographic accidents. The AL West was weak this year, somebody had to win it, and Houston beat the teams in front of them often enough to finish first. A team that plays a harder schedule and wins more games still gets a better seed. The structure did what it was designed to do.
The case that it is not: a team that went 81-81 is now hosting playoff baseball while clubs with better records are either out or playing a coin-flip wild card series. That is not a small distortion. It is the format telling a 90-win wild card team that geography matters more than what it did over six months.
We land closer to the second, and the fix is not complicated. Seed the playoff field by record regardless of division, the way basketball and hockey have crept toward. Divisions can still exist for scheduling and for rivalries. They do not need to be the thing that decides who gets a home series in October.
None of which takes anything from Houston. They played the schedule in front of them and finished first in it, and a clubhouse celebrating a division title should not have to apologize for the other teams in their own division. The complaint is with the structure, not the team that navigated it.
The question
Should a team that finished 81-81 be able to win a division and host a playoff series? And if the answer is no, why do divisions still determine seeding at all?
Elsewhere in sports: Texas won at Neyland for the first time ever.
Sources: Yahoo Sports · MLB.com · CBS Sports · Bleacher Report live blog
