A 3-way tie? This division looks closer than any we've seen in a decade

The best team in the American League West is the Astros, who have made the postseason eight consecutive times. No, wait; the best team is the Rangers, who won the World Series merely 15 months ago. No, wait; the best team is actually the Mariners, who tied for the best run prevention unit in the game last year, and bring back most of that same talented pitching staff.

But, wait, also, it doesn’t really even matter what those teams did last year or the years prior, because Kyle Tucker, Nathaniel Lowe, Ryan Pressly, Ty France and so on simply aren’t part of the picture in 2025, while Christian Walker, Isaac Paredes, Jake Burger, and presumably a whole lot more from Jacob deGrom and Kumar Rocker to many others are.

When we look ahead to what’s clearly going to be a competitive 2025 AL West race, all we can do is focus on the projections, which take into account past performance, aging, and projected playing time, and if you were to look at the FanGraphs version of that, you wouldn’t just find a close one. You’d find essentially a three-way tie.

2025 AL West division odds, FanGraphs (as of Feb. 10)

• Rangers 33%
• Mariners 31%
• Astros 30%
• A’s 4%
• Angels 3%

Don’t dwell too much on the difference between 33% and 31%, because it barely matters. That, right there, is about as tight as it gets. It's effectively a three-way tie.

What this is telling you is that when FanGraphs ran their projected season 20,000 times, each of Texas, Seattle, and Houston ended up atop the division about 6,000 times apiece – with a few scattered unexpected outcomes that landed the A’s and Angels with the title. You could take it as saying that “70% of the time, the Rangers don’t win the West,” and that’s true, but it’s also true for the Mariners and Astros. (Unsurprisingly, other projection systems see it slightly differently, though still close; Baseball Prospectus has the three teams winning within four games of each other.)

It’s important to remember that this does not mean that it’s terribly likely that all three teams will finish at or near the same record at the end of the season, because a million different things can and do happen – you can imagine how much Texas’ outcomes will change depending on if deGrom is healthy enough to throw 40 innings or 160, for example, or what happens if a team falls out of the race early and then sells at the Deadline. If you can tell us with certainty right now how many innings deGrom can give you, well, then there are many Major League teams who would be very interested in speaking with you.

What these figures actually say is that there’s no obvious favorite, that it’s as likely that one team wins the division (Texas) as another (Seattle) as another (Houston), and that’s what’s most interesting here. It’s not all that rare to look ahead to the season and anticipate a great two-team race – but what about one involving three teams? To answer that, we went back and looked at the last decade of preseason odds to see if there had been any recent seasons with a three-or-more-team muddle at the top of the division.

The answer: Not like this.

If we go back to 2016 – ignoring the shortened 2020 – and include the 2025 projections, then we have nine full seasons worth of projections to look at, and that’s 54 projected division races. Right away, we can tell you something fascinating: No division favorite of all of those 54 projected winners entered the season with lower divisional odds than the 33% that Texas is currently showing.

It stands out quite well if you look at this chart of every top-rated team’s divisional odds headed into the season. That 33% in the bottom row, highlighted in yellow? That’s Texas.

Since we know what all 54 of those teams had, odds-wise, headed into the season, we can look at what actually happened, too.

• About one-quarter of them (13) were what we’ll call Overwhelming Favorites, meaning one team with an 80% or better chance of winning the division. Here we’re talking about a number of recent Dodger teams, as well as the 2016 Cubs, the 2018-19 Astros, Cleveland in 2017-19 and so on. Of those 12 teams before this year that were Overwhelming Favorites, nine did actually win the division — good job, projections! The three that didn’t were the 2018 Cubs, who lost by one game; Cleveland in 2019; Atlanta in 2024.

• Roughly half of them (29) were what we’ll call Strong Favorites, meaning 50-79% odds to win the division. Of the 28 before this year, 13 of them won their division, and 15 did not, which is about the roughly 50/50 split you’d expect.

• Six more were Weak Favorites, meaning 40-49% odds to win, and of the four times that happened before this season, none won their divisions.

• Finally, and here’s what we’re really trying to get to, the No Favorite Found teams, when the top-rated team in the division had odds under 40% to win it. That had only happened four times in the 2016-23 range, and as you’ll see, it’s not quite the same as the Texas/Houston/Seattle trio this year.

The four previous times that the favorite was so uncertain were …

2021 National League Central
What the projections said: Coming off the shortened season, it was hard to know what was real or not, and the Brewers (37%) were lightly favored to take the division ahead of the Cardinals (25%), with the Cubs and Reds each having a puncher’s chance but not getting to even 20%.
What actually happened: Exactly that! The Brewers won 95 games, ahead of the second-place Cardinals (90), and the Reds and Cubs were competitive but well behind.

2023 American League Central
What the projections said: The Twins (39%) and Guardians (34%) were both seen as competitive and relatively even, but hardly overwhelming; the White Sox (21%) had a shot as well.
What actually happened: The Guardians won, with 92 wins, while the Twins collapsed late and finished third behind a .500 White Sox team.

2024 National League Central
What the projections said: A division which hasn’t really seen a great team since the Cubs of a decade ago had the Cardinals (34%) as light favorites, ahead of the Cubs (26%) and Brewers (18%).
What actually happened: Milwaukee overperformed, as they often do, winning 93, ahead of the Cubs and Cardinals, tied for second place. At least the top three teams were right, even if the order was not.

2024 American League East
What the projections said: The Yankees (36%), with Juan Soto in town, were seen as the favorites, though not by a lot over the Rays (24%) and Orioles (18%).
What actually happened: Nailed it, mostly. The Yankees won 94 games and went to the World Series, and the Orioles were in second, though the Rays fell to an 80-82 fourth-place finish.

All of which were interesting races, yet not quite the three-teamer we’re looking at right now. (In fact, the next closest projected race in this time frame is also this year in the American League, where the Twins, Tigers and Royals each have divisional odds between 26% and 36%, all coming in slightly higher than their Western counterparts likely because the bottom two teams in the West have a slight chance, while the White Sox very much do not.)

So: What have we learned? Over the last decade, there really hasn’t been a three-way division race projected to be this tight, and that makes the Alex Bregman saga all the more interesting, because while an All-Star level player like that generally won’t move the needle all by himself, it also doesn’t take a whole lot of needle moving to impact a race this close. If you thought the 2023 AL West race – when Texas and Houston tied with 90 wins ahead of an 88-win Seattle team – was close, we might not have seen anything yet.

What it means, then, is that the AL West race doesn’t really get going when the summer gets warm. It gets going on April 7, when the Mariners welcome the Astros and Rangers for three apiece to the notoriously difficult-to-hit-in T-Mobile Park. They’re going to matter a lot sooner than you’d think.