Astros and Rangers both lose, guaranteeing MLB’s first division champ without a winning record

The American League West, the worst division in baseball, got a little bit worse on Friday. It was enough to officially push the group into unprecedented territory.

The Houston Astros and the Texas Rangers, the two teams atop the division, both lost, pushing their records to 79-81 with two games left to play. That officially guarantees it won’t be a winning team uncorking the champagne at some point in the next days.

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It will be the first time in MLB history that a team .500 or worse wins a division.

With both teams playing on the road, the Rangers were blown out by the Minnesota Twins 10-2, while the Astros lost to the fourth-place Athletics 6-5.

Before 2026, the division champ closest to .500 was the 2005 San Diego Padres, who won the NL West with an 82-80 record then got swept in the NLDS by the St. Louis Cardinals. There have been playoff teams at or below .500 before, but never a division champ.

Whichever team wins the division, it will then get to host a wild-card series against the AL’s third wild-card team. The two other wild-card teams, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, will play each other despite both of them having a better record than the two teams in the other series.

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The Astros own the tiebreaker against the Rangers, so they effectively have the lead going into the weekend. They will continue playing the A’s and Twins, respectively, with the Rangers needing to win one more game than the Astros to steal the division.

In total, the AL West is 84 games below .500 with a combined -473 run differential. Every team is in the red in the latter stat, with the Rangers “leading” the pack at -48. There are 13 teams in MLB who would be leading the division if they were in there. That includes the Arizona Diamondbacks and Pittsburgh Pirates, who do not currently have a playoff spot.

This is a division so bad that three of its five teams — the Astros, the Angels and the A’s — have fired their general managers this season, a group that includes one of the division leaders. It’s a wide gamut of misery as well. The Mariners are one of the most disappointing teams in baseball after last year’s supposed breakthrough. The Astros and Rangers have both won titles in the past five years and fallen off considerably. The A’s are currently playing in a minor-league stadium after a messy divorce from Oakland. The Angels haven’t had a winning season since the year “Mad Men” went off the air.

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It’s all tremendously awkward. It will be awkward when a group of men celebrate winning a crown almost by default. It will be awkward when a stadium welcomes an ill-deserved playoff series against a team with a better record. It will be awkward looking at the division table in the future and wondering what on earth happened.