The American League's Best Reward Is Going to a Team With the Fourth-Best Record

Run the American League standings through September 4 and sort them by record, ignoring which division anybody is in.

Rays 84-57. Yankees 80-61. Red Sox 77-65. White Sox 74-67. Astros 73-69. Guardians 72-70.

Now run them through the bracket. The Rays and the White Sox get first-round byes. The Astros, at 73-69, host the Guardians in a best-of-three. The Yankees and the Red Sox — the second- and third-best records in the league — play each other in the wild-card round, and one of them is eliminated before the Division Series begins.

A team six and a half games worse than the Yankees gets to rest. Two teams better than everyone except Tampa Bay get to knock each other out. This is not a projection or a hypothetical: MLB's own playoff-picture page lists the American League in exactly that order — Rays, White Sox, Astros, Yankees, Red Sox, Guardians — and the wild-card series start September 29.

Why the bye is worth so much more than it looks

The instinct is to shrug: it's three days off, the good teams will be fine. The data says otherwise, and the number comes from the format's own short history.

David Schoenfield, writing on September 1, flagged it: since the current structure began in 2022, the higher seed in the best-of-three wild-card series has won 7 of 16. Not seven of sixteen games — seven of sixteen series. Being the better team in that round has been worth approximately nothing.

That is the whole argument in one statistic. A best-of-three, with no travel and often without a team's third starter mattering, is close to a coin flip regardless of who is better. So the bye is not a modest convenience. It is a free pass through the single most random gate in the bracket, and MLB currently hands two of them out by geography rather than by record.

Put it plainly: the most valuable asset in the American League postseason is being awarded to the fourth-best team in the American League, because of who its neighbours are.

The White Sox are the best story in baseball and that is not the point

Take nothing from Chicago. In 2024 this franchise lost 121 games, the most in the modern era. It lost 102 more in 2025. Three consecutive seasons of triple-digit losses, and then Will Venable's club spent most of 2026 in first place in the AL Central and sits at 74-67 with a division lead. Miguel Vargas, Colson Montgomery and Munetaka Murakami have each hit 29 home runs. Chase Meidroth is hitting .271 with 76 runs. Nobody predicted this and the South Side has earned every ticket it is selling in September.

They are also not a great baseball team, and the roster tells you so. Chicago hit .237 as a club through August 31. The rotation posted a 6.21 ERA in August, and Luis Castillo, the arm the front office went and got at the deadline, has a 6.45 for them. A 74-67 team with a six-plus rotation ERA in the season's most recent full month is exactly what its record says: good, improved, not close to the best team in its league.

The rules do not ask that question. They ask which division you are in.

The AL East is the whole distortion

Three of the four best records in the American League belong to the AL East. The Rays lead it. The Yankees are chasing them from four and a half back with Aaron Judge expected back in the second week of September. The Red Sox at 77-65 would lead the AL Central by three games and the AL West by four.

Instead, the East's second- and third-place teams are seeded fourth and fifth, which under the current format means they meet immediately. Every year the schedule makers push more games inside the division, which means the strongest division beats itself up all summer and is then punished a second time in October for the record that beating produced. The reward for playing in the league's hardest neighbourhood is a coin-flip series against the only other team that survived it.

The fix is one sentence. Seed one through six by record; keep automatic berths for division winners. Every division champion still makes the field, so the pennant races still mean something. The byes go to the two best teams. The Yankees and Red Sox no longer collide in Round 1 because of a map. The NFL has done this since 2020 and nobody's regular season became meaningless.

The counterargument, and it is a real one

Matt Snyder made the best version of it at CBS in October 2024, and the argument has not aged badly: the chaos is the product. Baseball's postseason has never been a device for identifying the best team, and pretending otherwise misreads the sport. The 1987 Twins won 85 games and a World Series. The 2023 Diamondbacks were plainly worse than the Dodgers and beat them anyway. Small samples in baseball are noise, so the only intellectually honest position is to enjoy the noise rather than engineer against it.

He is right about the sport and wrong about this specific complaint, and the distinction matters. Nobody in this piece is arguing that the better team should win. The argument is about who gets the advantage before a ball is thrown. Randomness inside the bracket is baseball. Randomness in the assignment of the bye is administration, and administration is the part you can fix without touching the game.

There is also a legitimate objection that reseeding devalues winning your division. That is true and it is small. Under a record-based seed, a division title still guarantees a berth, still guarantees a spot most teams do not get, and still gives you the tiebreak leverage teams fight over all September. What it stops guaranteeing is a top-two seed you did not earn against the league.

What we do not know

Whether MLB is even weighing this. There has been no public indication that the league office intends to revisit seeding before the current collective bargaining agreement is renegotiated, and format changes are bargained, not decreed. The players' association has historically defended anything that expands the field and has not staked out a position on seeding. Anyone telling you which way this goes is guessing, and so would we be.

We also do not know whether this scenario survives the month. Cleveland is 72-70 — two and a half games back in CBS's standings, three in ESPN's September 1 read — which is close enough that one bad Chicago week flips the whole thing. If the Guardians take the Central and the Yankees run down Tampa Bay, the bracket tidies itself and nobody writes this column. That is not a defence of the rule. A rule that only produces an absurd result when the standings cooperate is still a rule that produces absurd results.

The number to hold onto

Seven of sixteen. That is how often the better team has won the round MLB is about to make the Yankees and Red Sox play while a 74-67 club watches. If Chicago goes on to win a series in October, it will be a wonderful story about a team that lost 121 games two years ago, and it will also be a story the format bought them.

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