Look at the American League West this morning.
Houston 78-79. Texas 78-79. Tied for first. Both under .500.
Somebody is going to win that division. Whoever it is will hang a banner, print a t-shirt, and host a playoff game, and they will do it with a losing record, and the rules say that is completely fine.
Over in the Central it is barely better: Cleveland 82-75, Chicago 81-76, one game apart, and the winner gets to be a division champion with about eighty-three wins.
Meanwhile the Yankees are 90-67 and have to play a coin-flip series against Boston, who are 84-73. Both of them are better than the team that is going to win the West. Neither of them gets a banner.
Now, the part where everybody gets angry.
The take is going to be the American League is broken, and there will be a graphic, and somebody will use the word “product.” We would like to file a minority report.
A division is not a quality certificate. It is a geographic accident. The West was assembled decades ago because those cities are near each other and the planes are cheaper, not because somebody promised the winner would be good. When five teams in one time zone all have a bad year at once, one of them still has to finish first. That is arithmetic, not decay.
And the thing nobody says out loud: the .500 division race is the most fun race on the board. Nobody in it is supposed to be there. Nobody in it is managing for next year. Every one of those games is being played by people who know exactly how little anyone expects, which is the same condition under which every good bar story has ever been told.
The National League has Milwaukee at 98-59 and Los Angeles at 97-60 and it has been settled for a month. Nobody is driving three hours to watch that.
Somebody has to win the West. Let them. They earned it the same way everybody earns anything — by being the last one still standing in a room where everybody fell over.