Astros win woeful AL West division on final day of MLB regular season with Rangers loss
· Yahoo Sports
The race to win the AL West is finally over, much to the relief of everyone who likes good baseball. The Houston Astros have won the division after going neck-and-neck with the Texas Rangers until the end of the MLB regular season.
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The Astros and the Rangers both entered the final day of play with 80-81 records, meaning that neither team’s fate was entirely in their hands to make the postseason. As Houston held the tiebreaker with a 9-4 head-to-head edge, the Rangers’ 6-2 loss to the Minnesota Twins ended up being enough for the Astros to mathematically clinch the division.
Depending on the outcome of Houston’s last game, which they are winning, the team ends with a 80-82 record or a 81-81 record, marking the first time in MLB history that a team with a record of .500 or worse wins its division. The Astros make it to the postseason despite a season bleak enough that they fired general manager Dana Brown in August.
The AL West has been a blight among the other divisions for months now, with two of the worst teams in baseball (the A’s and the Los Angeles Angels) and the remaining three teams (the Astros, the Rangers and the deeply disappointing 2026 Seattle Mariners) battling it out for the top of the mediocre table.
Because of the way MLB playoff seeding currently works — a system that has been called into question give the AL West’s pitiful performance — the Astros will serve as the No. 3 seed as the worst of the three division title holders. Houston will face the No. 6 seed, the Chicago White Sox, in the wild card round, while the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox will face off as a No. 4 and No. 5 seeds, respectively. All three wild card teams have better records than the Astros.
This story will be updated.