MLB Enters Final Week With 4 NL Wild Card Teams and 3 AL Division Races in Play

Q: Will MLB's expanded playoff format actually allow a losing team with a sub-.500 record to sneak into October?

Yes. Under MLB’s 12-team format, a sub-.500 team can make the postseason, and this season the American League has presented a real path for it to happen. The key reason is structural: all three division winners automatically qualify, and the third division winner is guaranteed the No. 3 seed even if its record is worse than multiple wild-card teams. With expanded interleague play and an unusually weak AL overall, that creates room for a mediocre division champion to slip in. That risk has centered on the AL West. Texas has been around .500 while still leading the division, with Houston just behind and holding the head-to-head tiebreaker. If the Rangers were to finish below .500 and still win the West, they would reach October despite a losing record. A sub-.500 wild-card berth is less likely because wild-card spots go to the next-best records, but a losing division winner is entirely possible. This would not be unprecedented in principle, though it would be rare in a full season. MLB has had losing playoff teams only in unusual formats, such as the strike-shortened 1981 season and the expanded 2020 pandemic season. What is new is that the current format makes such an outcome more plausible in a normal 162-game year. So the answer is yes: the expanded format does allow it, and in 2026 it is not just theoretical.

3 articles · Updated · FanGraphs · Sep 21

One week remains in the regular season, and MLB’s tightest races could be settled by tiebreakers rather than extra games under the post-2022 format.
In the NL, Milwaukee leads Los Angeles 98-58 to 96-60 for the top seed and owns that tiebreaker, while Chicago and San Diego are tied at 87-69 atop the Wild Card race, with Philadelphia one game back.
Chicago holds the strongest NL Wild Card position because it won season series against San Diego, Philadelphia and Arizona; the Padres’ 13 wins in 14 games pushed the Diamondbacks’ playoff odds down to 5.6%.
In the AL, Tampa Bay can clinch the East with 1 win, Cleveland leads the Central at 81-75 but trails Chicago in the season series 7-6, and Texas holds a 1-game AL West edge despite Houston owning the 9-4 tiebreaker.
Those division swings feed directly into the final AL Wild Card spot, where Houston, Toronto, Chicago, Cleveland and Texas all have scenario-dependent paths shaped by head-to-head, intradivision and intraleague records.