Houston Astros secure the most embarrassing kind of Major League Baseball history with AL West win

When changed the schedule to ensure that the final day of the regular season featured all 15 games starting within a few minutes of each other, Sunday is what they envisioned. Mostly.

While most postseason spots and seeds were decided either within the last week or the last few days, there were two races that came down to the final day of the year. The American League West race featured the Houston Astros and Texas Rangers entering the day tied at 80-81, remarkably, and the third wild card spot in the National League between the Philadelphia Phillies and Arizona Diamondbacks.

The Phillies, who as recently as last week had a 99.1% chance of reaching the postseason, per FanGraphs, avoided a historic collapse and clinched a wild card series appearance with a 7-3 win over the Tampa Bay Rays.

WITH ONE MONTH LEFT, AMERICAN LEAGUE TEAMS ARE HEADING TOWARDS AN EMBARRASSING, HISTORIC LOW

But the Astros, even with a win, did in fact make an embarrassing type of history: they are officially the worst division-winning team in baseball history.

The previous low-water mark was the 2005 San Diego Padres, who won the NL West with an 82-80 record. And while the Astros won 9-0 over the long-eliminated Athletics to avoid the 80-82 record, 81–81 marks a new low winning percentage for a division winner over a full season.

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Even crazier? The Astros were extremely fortunate to finish the season at .500.

While wins and losses are what decide the standings and outcomes, run differential has proven over time to be a significantly better predictor of future win and loss records than the previous standings. Essentially, the better you are at outscoring the opposition, the more likely it is that you'll win more games moving forward. One-run outcomes are not sustainable, but blowouts are illustrative of team quality.

Run differentials are also used to build "expected" records. Meaning that in the history of baseball, a specific run differential is expected to result in a given number of wins and losses. The Miami Marlins, for example, outscored the opposition by just three runs over the course of the season, which is an "expected" record of 81-81. Makes sense, they were even with the other teams in the league, they should finish at an even .500.

By contrast, the Milwaukee Brewers finished with a league-best +214 run differential, good for an "expected" record of 103-59. They finished 103-59.

But teams frequently over perform or underperform against their expected win-loss record, for any number of reasons. A bad bullpen